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.
I have that forked, as well as a fork of funscii. Both have fixes in the main branch. I've added a fair amount of stuff beyond that in a branch of unscii.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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!_
I really want to like Pragmata Pro, but for such a price I'd like to see a couple more examples of the font used for programming! The website only has three tiny examples for Haskell, Agda, and APL (!). The tester from MonoLisa should be the benchmark here
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.
What's the experience with Font Forge for creating pixel fonts? I have never used it but I always assumed that a font creation tool made for arbitrary style "vector" fonts is probably unwieldy if all you want is square pixels, to be rendered pixel-perfect, etc.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadOkay LLM
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...
* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/tree/2.1.1f
* https://github.com/jdebp/funscii
[0]: https://emehmedovic.com/sans_nouveaux/
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.
"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.
https://departuremono.com/
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!_
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.