Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again
korigamik.dev
korigamik.dev
I had to work with DOS screens that were sketched to different aspect ratios and blurred and it was so painful, specially after having seen proper fonts on the screen.
One of the reasons for starting to use Linux was using high quality fonts with the terminal.
Yes! Speaking of Linux, I'm personally very font of Terminus.
I like it so much my main coding font is a modified, pixel-perfect (no AA at all) version of Terminus since forever (I modified a few letters like the 'l' and the 's' and took a few glyphs from a pixel-perfect Monaco font [like %, &, @ and modified those a bit too). I did it so many years ago I don't remember the process (but I've got notes about it, so I could redo it).
I'm on a (non-retina / non 4K) 38" ultra-wide display that does 3840x1600 natively (and it's the resolution I use). I love it for I can have three 1280x1600 "columns" side by side (but I'm using a tiling WM so I've got many preset layouts anyway). YMMV.
I finally decided to take the matter into my own hands. I looked for IBM PC OEM fonts [2] and similar ones [3], stored the bitmaps as integer arrays within my code [2], and used them to render each character cell by cell. I am very happy with the results.
It was a childhood dream of mine to write a game like this, but I did not have sufficient access to computers as a child. So I could fulfil this dream only as an adult, a few years ago. The implementation is very simple, and everything on the canvas, including the text, is drawn using fillRect().
By the way, if you happen to do something similar, I have made all the bitmaps available as integer arrays in a separate, standalone project [5].
[1] https://susam.net/invaders.html
[2] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
[3] https://www.dafont.com/modern-dos.font
[4] https://codeberg.org/susam/invaders/src/branch/main/invaders...
I did this for my canvas renderer for BBS Ansi... Though, I need to get the next step(s) so I can start testing against a websocket based door server I'm also working on.
- https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-dire...
In general bitmap fonts avoid the blurryness of modern font rendering made for high DPI monitors, which fails spectacularly on low DPI monitors (which is what I still have). And blurry text give me literal headaches. And this is why I gave up on anything but bitmap fonts in recent years.
I think I've only found Liberation and Hack to appear decent on standard density display. Roboto Mono is nicely shaped but blurry. I think Noto Mono used to have hints but dropped them. It was hours spent trying out different fonts only to ultimately go back to msttcore-fonts for me.
I have to show people extremely zoomed-in screenshots of how $VENDOR default monospaced fonts get rendered compared to Terminus at the correct size in order for them to understand my pain. The hinting is just blurry bleh.
These days, because I am also old, I want a comparatively large pixel-perfect font. I've yet to find a good one but haven't looked much beyond Terminus honestly. Maybe I can render it an acceptable integer multiple without it being too large?
I never knew there was a TTF variant, might be a good fit on software that stubbornly blurs it when rendering in hi-dpi.
And no, subpixel anti-aliasing doesn't help, the colour bleeding is even worse.
For reference, I live in Mexico, and bought the monitor with less than two week's worth of groceries. Recognized brands would cost four or five times more, but there are options for every budget.
There may come a day when we can no longer reliably tell the difference, but for now, I'd just prefer not to see this kind of writing popping up on HN.
> The part I keep coming back to
Immediately caught my eye. Reading in...
> Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again. Not abstract “digital products”. Not generic interfaces. Not frictionless panels pretending to be neutral. Actual computers.
Aaand there it is. Tab closed.
1. https://v-n-n-v.github.io/chatgpt-voice.html (bit outdated now, from 2025-03)
It just feels disingenuous. Put a disclaimer at the top, so at least I know. But there's not, it's the author's name.
I can prompt chatgpt to write me this. I want to hear from people who know the tech/history.
That’s bullshit. It’s very common.
Ad-HomineLLM
Of course this proxy isn't perfect, I understand many people use AI to make their writing more comprehensible when English isn't their first language.
A comment should argue the merit of the work not attack the source or medium.
If the author does not care to take the time to craft their message, why should I care to take the time to read it?
If you used AI, and I cannot tell, I don't care that you used AI. But when it's clear and present almost immediately, I feel as though the author does not respect their audience (of which I am a member).
As every composition teacher would say: "use your own words."
I get the attention economy is messed up right now, but using it as a justification for being curmudgeonly or abandoning principles is lame.
All it knows about your thoughts are from what text you already fed it with, and it will end up adding things you don't intend or agree with. Even just telling it to fix grammar it can subtly do this.
Obviously it's for entertainment, but there are many channels where content creators post questions that have asked LLMs [1]
I also think many people are prompting image generators to see what they produce. I can remember a time when many images that involved asking ChatGPT to make someone aggressive would make the people in the image black, whereas using neutral terms would have them generate as white.
I also remember asking early GPT 4 LLMs to explain something to me like a 5 year old from X location and basically seeing the network produce varied responses as it was clear it had an idea of some 5 year olds from one city being inherently smarter than others. Then you can change it to say a 5 year old girl or a 5 year old boy and it would dumb things down a lot more for the boy.
Can the same argument be made about a writer that is blind? If a blind person submitted work about fonts would we be equally as dismissive?
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
But knowing that the article is AI generated is useful, because that tells me to not to read it.
But the bitmaps do make me nostalgic, maybe useful to read my own old code and cringe a little less.
One of the few bitmap fonts (with terminus) having somewhat complete unicode support and going to very large pixel sizes, so that they are visible on modern screens with tiny pixels.
I have zero desire to use a C64 again, aside from the occasional nostalgia pang for a specific game or program. But I do miss that feeling of complete, total understand of the thing in front of me. I think that’s the feeling that implanted on me, and that the aesthetics conjure. “Hey, the world is complicated, but this font looks a lot like the time when you felt like you knew everything.”
ps: i have the same relationship to vintage desktop computer form factor, something about an old blocky box, an hdd led, a cd drive
This seems to be the center of the author's argument.
But I prefer legibility, readability, being easy on the eye. I also prefer antialiasing for its smoothness.
Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I greatly appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in books. No distracting jaggies.
I don't want my computer to feel like some nostalgic 1980's computer. I just want to get my work done, which involves a lot of reading and writing, both code and non-code, which is just more legible with vector fonts on a retina screen.
At the end of the day, jaggies are a visual distraction. They're cool if you want a retro vibe that distracts and calls attention to itself for aesthetic purposes. But not for general computer usage.
Not all of us are in that position, and modern font rendering has gotten really bad on non-high DPI monitors, so using a bitmap font has been a way to get rid of the blur and get back to sharp crisp text.
For me, I'd rather have jagged text than a blurry literally headache inducing mess.
That said, the issue here isn't that one is better than the other, but that for some people one or the other is easier to read, and the right answer is that all of this need to be configurable. Just like light and dark mode.
They're making an argument for bitmap fonts even on modern Retina displays as far as I can tell, since they're talking about making modern computers feel like older computers.
I'm pushing against that.
So are serifs, and people don't complain about those. Whether any "visual distraction" actually distracts you is a matter of what you're accustomed to. If you read enough cursive or blackletter it will start to look normal to you. I disable anti-aliasing because I'm accustomed to aliasing and it doesn't distract me at all. In exchange, I get sharp text on an 1080p monitor, effectively quadrupling my graphics performance because I no longer need 4K. I'd prefer bitmap fonts, but in practice I find full automatic hinting of vector fonts good enough.
The only cases where I can see anti-aliasing helping are with Chinese and Japanese fonts, which have characters with unusually fine details. But on any GUI using Fontconfig you can enable anti-aliasing for those fonts specifically and leave it disabled for the rest.
Jaggies come from a limitation of the pixel grid. They arbitrarily make diagonal strokes and curves bumpy while horizontal and vertical strokes are perfectly smooth, an inconsistency that would otherwise have no rhyme or reason behind it. Before letterforms were constrained to square grids, nobody was making diagonals and curves bumpy because it was a desirable aesthetic effect.
Jaggies are a distraction from the underlying letterform we all recognize. We know they are an undesirable distortion. Serifs are not. They serve an intentional aesthetic purpose, proportioned in a carefully balanced way.
There are reasons people like them more than just that "they're used to them", however. I named a couple of them. Just because they originated in stone doesn't mean we kept using them for the same reason. A lot of things originate for one reason and then become used for other reasons.
Believe me, I got "used to" bitmap fonts throughout the 80's and 90's. But I still always preferred the 300dpi version of a document from my LaserWriter and then inkjet. Getting used to bitmap fonts never meant preferring them for general computer usage. Jaggies that appear arbitrarily on some strokes but not others is not visually pleasing. Nostalgic, maybe, but virtually never anything you'd choose if you weren't intentionally trying to create a retro vibe.
The fonts presented do look amazing, so absolutely will ck figure my terminal with one of them.
> Because they still work.
I find this writing style so viscerally infuriating.