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jrdres 10 hours ago [-]
A forgotten point is that modern pixel fonts all assume pixels have a 1:1 ratio: height the same as width, so an 8x8 character box is perfectly square.
That's NOT true for many of the old computer displays. Most had finer resolution in the horizontal compared to vertical lines, so more pixels across than in the same distance down. 1:1 "square pixels" was an innovation of the Macintosh, and very unusual for the time. So the fonts on this page displayed on other 80's machines would not look "right". And fonts from those machines brought to modern displays also look off.
zokier 1 hours ago [-]
It's not that forgotten, for example int10h font collection (which probably is the biggest bitmap font resource) prominently shows aspect-ratio corrections for the fonts https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
Kerrick 17 hours ago [-]
Analog Mono and Two Slice are really neat. If you like those, you'll probably also like another of my favorite modern pixel fonts: Departure Mono. https://departuremono.com
bbx 17 hours ago [-]
It feels like the one used in the Papers, Please video game.
arttaboi 6 hours ago [-]
Amazing! Thank you for sharing.
datawars 16 hours ago [-]
Beautiful! Thank you!
fold_left 15 hours ago [-]
Came here to say the same, I actually like Departure so much I use it as my coding and Terminal font. I'll definitely be trying out the fonts in the original post.
Liskni_si 2 hours ago [-]
Anyone else still using the 7x13 "misc fixed" font that comes with X11? I just can't switch. Perfectly readable on both 14" 1920×1200 and 35" 3440×1440. Yes it's small but that's kinda the point.
The only issue is that Nerd Font symbols are really hard to read at that size, even if one manages to get them to render (which isn't that hard in alacritty but needs some extra hacks in rxvt-unicode).
efskap 18 hours ago [-]
I like https://viznut.fi/unscii/ - meant for ascii art but still works well in a terminal, and still gets unicode updates
It would be nice to add the license/copyright rules associated with these, which is important if you are using in something like a game.
evrimoztamur 16 hours ago [-]
Geist looks like unadulterated garbage, a sloppy rendition of a vector font onto a pixel grid, lack of character and care to banding and shape...
IgorPartola 13 hours ago [-]
I worked on an embedded project a few years ago using a tiny 128x64 display and wanted to use a pixel font but none of the ones I found made me particularly happy so I made my own. Turns out it is very easy to do. Font Forge is fantastic and very easy to use and once you get going by nailing down a few letters at the size you want you can quickly make something that is cohesive, pleasant, and easy to read. I highly recommend this as an exercise.
As a bonus I added a bunch of open source icons as font glyphs for my project and it was really fun to figure out how small I can make them while still being distinctive.
kristianp 1 hours ago [-]
People are using vector formats to imitate bitmap fonts? What is the world coming to?
I say that as someone who recently enabled bitmap fonts in my installation of XWindows, so I could use them in Konsole. It's satisfying to see the crisp verticals, but unfortunately Terminus has too much spacing between the letters for my liking.
Also, dotsies[0]: 5 high 1 wide, no horizontal spacing for kerning, ascii-space is just the all-white "character", letters (text) only and made more for visual density than actual pixel scarcity.
So, Analog Mono and Geist both have enough pixels per glyph that they don't really read as pixel fonts below sizes of ~20px. Analog kinda aleviates that by being made up of big (overlapping) blocks of 2x2 pixels. Geist just kinda looks like a downscaled vector font (to me) though.
kevin_thibedeau 14 hours ago [-]
It looks like a high-DPI X11 font to me. It isn't particularly original or unique.
achr2 13 hours ago [-]
I am very fond of Gohu font. I have used it on a recent static blog formatting adventure http://dntbl.ink , converted to woff2. I couldn't be happier with how it renders and gives that VAX feel.
frankling_ 9 hours ago [-]
There are also these somewhat classic-looking bitmap terminal fonts large enough for modern displays: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI
Boltgolt 1 days ago [-]
> Geist Pixel isn’t a novelty font. It’s a system extension.
Some people wrote like that before LLMs polluted the water.
Just like people used em dashes before LLMs.
I used bullet points heavily before LLMs.
thechao 15 hours ago [-]
I felt personally attacked when LLMs came out: I'm an avid user of "—", bullets, numbered lists, and the word "delve". It's been a miserable couple of years.
mikepurvis 15 hours ago [-]
Many many years ago I wrote a book for Apress, and the style guide for that instilled in me a lot of practices that now make my writing feel LLM-ish to some readers:
- Use bulleted lists, but always introduce and conclude a list with prose; a list can't immediately follow a heading or end a section.
- Use a mix of long and short sentences; in long sentences with parentheticals, use a mix of commas, parens, semicolons, and em dashes.
- With multiple continuous blocks of prose that aren't naturally broken up by an illustration or heading, start a paragraph with an inline bold statement to help anchor the reader.
flkiwi 14 hours ago [-]
LLMs write like that because people wrote like that. Enough, unfortunately for my remaining love of humanity, to cause the LLMs to adopt the quirk.
hnlmorg 13 hours ago [-]
I know. That’s my point.
People talk about LLM writing style like it’s a unique butterfly and humans don’t write that they. But we do. Which is why LLMs do too.
sublinear 16 hours ago [-]
I still use bullets extensively. You can easily tell when a human writes them when they are trees instead of lists.
hnlmorg 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think even that is a reliable indicator because I'm currently reviewing an LLM generated bullet tree right now.
sublinear 9 hours ago [-]
Oh interesting. Before the LLM craze, I only ever saw good bullet trees in legalese and git commit messages. The trainwrecks were far more likely to be the rare attempt by HR in a big email or in the odd Jira epic by a PM.
I wouldn't think LLMs would have much to train on. I still see some bad ones, but I don't feel like the quality ratio or overall quantity has changed. I do see more bullet lists though.
wyre 16 hours ago [-]
For sure, but I don't think I'm going to give Vercel benefit of the doubt that they aren't writing their copy with an LLM.
FarmerPotato 17 hours ago [-]
but what does that even mean?
CarVac 11 hours ago [-]
I made myself a pixel font for composite (well, monochrome) video output on an RP2040:
The letters are 8x15 and verticals are 2 pixels wide to work better on older CRT televisions with less-sophisticated chroma filtering on their composite inputs.
I explicitly tried to avoid locking into 45 degree diagonals...
My only question now is, how do I turn this font into something I can use on a computer? I couldn't figure it out the last time I tried.
slazaro 4 hours ago [-]
I made PixelForge [0] a while ago just for creating pixel fonts and being able to export to TTF. I had it semi-abandoned for a few years, but I'm about to release a new version in the next few days! [1]
I did it with no reference to other fonts, just to my own tastes. It took a bit of iteration to get letter centering on the lower cases to work well but I think it's in a good place.
Sarah Cadigan-Fried has designed some very cool modern pixel art fonts worth checking! https://www.soft-type.com/
erickhill 15 hours ago [-]
There's an interesting symmetry between the knitting, perler bead and pixel art crowds.
phatskat 13 hours ago [-]
There was a talk at a Linux conference a while back relating knitting to programming and I’ve yet to watch it because the audio on YT wasn’t great but it’s on my list.
I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.
rigonkulous 14 hours ago [-]
See also, beach pebbles.
fsckboy 17 hours ago [-]
>Andrew Gleeson designed Analog Mono, “fixing the crimes of VCR OSD Mono.” There used to be this classic pixel font that you’d see everywhere in the 1990s on hi-fi equipment: VCRs, TVs, camcorders, etc. One of its challenges was a low baseline which resulted in all the letters with descenders pulled up
"VCR OSD Mono is a free bitmap font created by Riciery Leal, inspired by the on-screen display text of vintage VCRs. It is suitable for retro designs and supports 39 languages"
VCR OSD Mono committed no crimes, but it is a crime to make that accusation. VCR OSD Mono faithfully duplicated VCR ASCII character generation. If you want to "fix" it, what's stopping you from "fixing" it all the way to Helvetica or Times or Typewriter? Give a rationale that justifies your own changes, but don't attack others who have a rationale for theirs.
it's fine you want to make a new font. it's not fine to point fingers at people who did a more faithful job than you.
rigonkulous 14 hours ago [-]
Hey .. you do need to know that font people regularly reference each other like this .. its kind of a thing in typography, and its a means of demonstrating inspiration and lineage, more than anything else - calling out ones inspiration, in fact.
If there is any one particular hat who can sell controversy, its the typographer.
>fix it all the way to Helvetica
..
Akzidenz-Grotesk Helvetica || gtfo, nichtwa?
mindslight 8 hours ago [-]
Honestly I was just trying to figure out how many lines of text I could cram onto a small OLED display, and came to the conclusion that the descenders were an unnecessary waste of space. 2+ pixels of vertical space wasted for 5 glyphs! So my heart goes out to VCR OSD Mono.
sheept 18 hours ago [-]
My pixel font of choice is Sans Nouveaux[0] (requires Flash). It's MIT licensed too.
I still use it (sometimes 1.x, sometimes 2.x) in terminals and IDEs to this day
sssilver 18 hours ago [-]
Two Slice is shockingly readable.
jareklupinski 17 hours ago [-]
got caught up on decoding 'tends'
kristjansson 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know if it counts as a 'pixel' font, but https://fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/ has hand-drawn bitmaps for a huge swath of unicode (and hand-hinting for aliased rendering IIRC?)
It's not quite as overtly retro, but it's a great functional font, and a great art object besides (at least that's how I justified the price!_
RedNifre 17 hours ago [-]
Could somebody explain the Coral Pixel font? It makes no sense to me, given that the whole point of sub pixels was to look sharp without looking colorful. It only ever looked like that when you took a screenshot and then zoomed in, which seems extremely niche.
gilrain 11 minutes ago [-]
> the whole point of sub pixels was to look sharp without looking colorful
That was the point, but it never worked: in practice, at least for me, text was smeary and colorful in that era. I wouldn’t want to use Coral Pixel, but I can imagine someone else being nostalgic for it.
blt 17 hours ago [-]
All technology, no matter how undesirable it once felt, eventually becomes nostalgic for somebody.
zeckalpha 17 hours ago [-]
Depends on the DPI of your monitor and your glasses prescription.
omoikane 9 hours ago [-]
> Coral Pixels
The version at Github and Google fonts seems old, the one from the font maker's website is at version 1.01, which includes Kanji characters:
Side note... the best pixel fonts are the ones a game programmer, on a 48hrs ludum dare run, is inevitably speed drawing, pixel by pixel, in MS Paint :)
Dwedit 17 hours ago [-]
The first font on the page mentions raising up descenders (g j p q y) so that pixels don't go below the baseline. You can often find characters with minimal descenders in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) fonts. Sometimes a raised-descender version is found among the fullwidth-form letters.
drob518 14 hours ago [-]
I find our human need to embrace nostalgia interesting. That we would design blocky “pixel fonts” in vector formats so that we can scale and resize them is quite ironic.
somat 12 hours ago [-]
if we are doing a survey, there is spleen which was adopted as the default console font for openbsd.
That's NOT true for many of the old computer displays. Most had finer resolution in the horizontal compared to vertical lines, so more pixels across than in the same distance down. 1:1 "square pixels" was an innovation of the Macintosh, and very unusual for the time. So the fonts on this page displayed on other 80's machines would not look "right". And fonts from those machines brought to modern displays also look off.
The only issue is that Nerd Font symbols are really hard to read at that size, even if one manages to get them to render (which isn't that hard in alacritty but needs some extra hacks in rxvt-unicode).
As a bonus I added a bunch of open source icons as font glyphs for my project and it was really fun to figure out how small I can make them while still being distinctive.
I say that as someone who recently enabled bitmap fonts in my installation of XWindows, so I could use them in Konsole. It's satisfying to see the crisp verticals, but unfortunately Terminus has too much spacing between the letters for my liking.
nowadays all the alpha exists in making your software look like a cool fantasy tome: https://skeddles.itch.io/eldring-pro
[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20171103012446/http://dotsies.org...
Okay LLM
Just like people used em dashes before LLMs.
I used bullet points heavily before LLMs.
- Use bulleted lists, but always introduce and conclude a list with prose; a list can't immediately follow a heading or end a section.
- Use a mix of long and short sentences; in long sentences with parentheticals, use a mix of commas, parens, semicolons, and em dashes.
- With multiple continuous blocks of prose that aren't naturally broken up by an illustration or heading, start a paragraph with an inline bold statement to help anchor the reader.
People talk about LLM writing style like it’s a unique butterfly and humans don’t write that they. But we do. Which is why LLMs do too.
I wouldn't think LLMs would have much to train on. I still see some bad ones, but I don't feel like the quality ratio or overall quantity has changed. I do see more bullet lists though.
https://github.com/PhobGCC/PhobGCC-SW/blob/main/PhobGCC/rp20...
(search for 1 to see letterforms)
The letters are 8x15 and verticals are 2 pixels wide to work better on older CRT televisions with less-sophisticated chroma filtering on their composite inputs.
I explicitly tried to avoid locking into 45 degree diagonals...
My only question now is, how do I turn this font into something I can use on a computer? I couldn't figure it out the last time I tried.
[0] https://www.pixel-forge.com/
[1] https://itch.io/t/6384009/new-update-soon
FontStruct: https://fontstruct.com/
Calligraphr: https://www.calligraphr.com/en/
Kreative Korp: https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/index.shtml#rela...
Glyphs: https://glyphsapp.com/learn/pixelfont
PixelForge: https://www.pixel-forge.com/
[1] https://imgur.com/a/0jcNGHv
You can see an older version ("a" has been revised to better center the letter) in action on a monochrome CRT here: https://github.com/PhobGCC/PhobGCC-doc/blob/main/For_Users/P...
https://x.com/TimoNoko/status/2030735635313545330
https://www.dafont.com/perfect-dos-vga-437.font
I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.
"VCR OSD Mono is a free bitmap font created by Riciery Leal, inspired by the on-screen display text of vintage VCRs. It is suitable for retro designs and supports 39 languages"
VCR OSD Mono committed no crimes, but it is a crime to make that accusation. VCR OSD Mono faithfully duplicated VCR ASCII character generation. If you want to "fix" it, what's stopping you from "fixing" it all the way to Helvetica or Times or Typewriter? Give a rationale that justifies your own changes, but don't attack others who have a rationale for theirs.
it's fine you want to make a new font. it's not fine to point fingers at people who did a more faithful job than you.
If there is any one particular hat who can sell controversy, its the typographer.
>fix it all the way to Helvetica
..
Akzidenz-Grotesk Helvetica || gtfo, nichtwa?
[0]: https://emehmedovic.com/sans_nouveaux/
It's not quite as overtly retro, but it's a great functional font, and a great art object besides (at least that's how I justified the price!_
That was the point, but it never worked: in practice, at least for me, text was smeary and colorful in that era. I wouldn’t want to use Coral Pixel, but I can imagine someone else being nostalgic for it.
The version at Github and Google fonts seems old, the one from the font maker's website is at version 1.01, which includes Kanji characters:
https://tanukifont.com/sango/
("sango" is coral in Japanese)
https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
https://tom7.org/fixedersys/
> ... it does have a few small problems, such as not working on modern computers ...
When connecting to this site in firefox says
> An error occurred during a connection to tom7.org. Peer attempted old style (potentially vulnerable) handshake.
https://departuremono.com/
You might also like https://commitmono.com/