Undefined medium – A free and open-source monospace typeface | Hacker News Reader

Undefined medium – A free and open-source monospace typeface

github.com

56 points_jhrl33 comments

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A preview image of the font on the README would go a long way.

Looks like the website is done with it: https://undefined-medium.com/

So people like this but think GNU Unifont looks horrible?

Interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Unifont

To me this looks way more playful and retro! Unifont is in a weird uncanny valley between pixel art and a normal monospace font.

If you are used to monospace bitmap fonts GNU Unifont does indeed look horrible. The thing that bothers me most is that if you type "l2345" you would never notice that the first character is a lowercase "L" and not "1".

For me "Gohufont" (http://font.gohu.org) hits all the sweet spots considering monospace bitmap fonts. There is even a bold version which is rare for fonts with this small size.

Wait, they are similar, but they are not the same. Lowercase l has a straight serif line on top, and 1 has a bent serif. It's also shorter compared to the base.

Standing alone you can never be quiet sure. Could easily be solved with removing 3 pixels from the bottom serif.

Plenty of fonts fail this test, tho... Including my default font: 0l00l

https://ibb.co/YZc1J9v (Brave on Android)

I recently learned that old typewriters didn’t have a “1” key. I thought my olevetti was broken but turns out the lowercase “L” is used for the number one.

Not implying that it’s ok, but maybe those original decisions inherited some of that history, even if not relevant, since it was based on mechanical limitations, to reduce the required number of typebar arms.

The nice thing about unifont is how complete it is, not so much how it looks (which IMO is not awesome.)

Many mono-space fonts lack the chess pieces for example.

This looks cool, but I'm not sure it looks practical. Why do I want a pixel-grid typeface for programming?

I think some people are upset as to how font rendering engines render fonts, so they decided "get rid of that and I will manually place every pixel where I want it".

Maybe you like being able to see the pixels?

That's why I like pixel-looking fonts, anyway...

Nostalgia.

It isn't for that, it is a decorative retro font.

I think that HTML is a creative medium and that you can have more fun with it than you can with old fashioned desktop publishing programs like Photoshop. This font adds to the toolkit and the possibilities, I will be making a mental note of it.

The readme specifically says "undefined medium is a free and open-source pixel grid-based monospace typeface suitable for programming, ...".

I agree it's decorative, I love the style, but the docs are implying there's a reason you might want this for practical use.

A monospaced 8 bit pixel font I made is 'Liquid Mean', which also aims at Unicode (with some 2400 characters). But it is available only in a weird format as a C library or an private format text file. http://www.theiling.de/projects/liquid.html

Anyone use this font as their daily driver (so to speak)? I'm skeptical of the readability and hour-to-hour fatigue.

Nice work. I noticed the number 5 used in the fractions looks a bit larger/out of place. I think it may have 1-2 extra pixels. I also think the {} () is problematic, may need to be solved a different way.

What's with this trend of not having issues on GitHub?

Do I really have make a PR first to discuss any bugs that I found?

(I say trend, because I'm noticing it more and more on open source projects.)

The project hasn't been maintained since 2010 according to the README, so that'd be my guess for this particular case.

Latest commit was 4 hours ago.

That’s a different project.

Oops, misread that. My mistake.

I installed it just for the fun of it in a secondary profile for my terminals. Love how it looks, but at 10pt I think I might have to push my chair forward a bit. :)

My only problem with it, especially for code, would be how tiny the difference is between () and {} in this font -- I feel like that could be hard to spot.

Out of curiosity. What's the minimum grid size someone has created a readable font for? This is pretty nice at 5x7, but how low can we go?

3x3: https://tonypai.itch.io/3x3-pixel-font

Impresseive, but with some significant cheats for B, Z and the digits.

3x5 is pretty easy and was common on tiny devices before high DPI screens became cheap.

https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/91523

Below that, things get a little weird, e.g., https://github.com/Michaelangel007/nanofont3x4.

If you’re allowed to use LCD sub pixels, you can make a 1x5 font!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dafalcon/5204413187

This looks great! Maybe I'm just bad at finding fonts, but a lot of pixelated fonts I've used in the past either look good at large sizes or small sizes, but not at both.

I can immediately think of a few projects where I might want to swap out fonts to use this.

Neat. Brings me back to the 80's!

font-family: undefined;

... is going to make for some alarming-looking stylesheets.

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