A few interesting modern pixel fonts | Hacker News Reader

A few interesting modern pixel fonts

unsung.aresluna.org

418 pointszdw112 comments

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.

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/

Square pixels were certainly not an innovation of the Macintosh. The earliest raster scan workstation I'm aware of is the Alto, released in 1973. It and the ones that came after it like the Star and Dorado all had square pixels. So did the early 1980s engineering workstations like Apollo and Sun, which also came out before Macintosh.

I think the Amiga is the most well-known example of what OP means. Older home computers which could be connected to TVs generally had resolutions up to 320x200 (or x240 for PAL) and square pixels. The Amiga could double that on both axes to 640x400/480, but because of the interlaced display of typical TVs/TV-based monitors, that would flicker so bad that it made productive working impossible. So the default resolution used by AmigaOS was 640x200/240, and the fonts were optimized for that.

Even in the PC world, the most common resolution in for CGA, EGA, and VGA remained 320x200 for many years. With square pixels, this would be 16:10, but the usual case was that this resolution was displayed fullscreen on a 4:3 display, so individual pixels would have an aspect ratio of 5:6.

Most DOS-era games took this into account, so e.g. if the artist wanted to draw a circle 20 pixels tall, they'd make it 24 pixels wide. Textmode followed this pattern as well, so when rendered on a modern square-pixel display without aspect correction, will look vertically squashed compared to their original appearance.

But the Lisa, whose developers included PARC alumni who had moved to Apple, had rectangular pixels.

Tall-aspected rectangular pixels enabled early displays to support 80+ characters on a line with fewer bits.

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

It feels like the one used in the Papers, Please video game.

Beautiful! Thank you!

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.

For programming, you can also try out Terminus (there’s also a TTF version): https://files.ax86.net/terminus-ttf/

Yeah my programming font since many years now is a pixel-perfect (no AA at all) modified version of Terminus. I modified it myself: don't even remember with which software (but I've got notes about the modifications I did and what's required should I want to modify something again).

I remove a pixel from the lowercase 's' (the top-rightmost one), I modified lowercase 'l' a bit (so it looks less like the '1' digit), I replaced a few characters like the at sign '@' with those from a pixel-perfect Apple Monaco font, and I like to have an empty hole in the middle of my pipe symbol (which still cannot be mistaken for a colon).

Plus a few mods I forgot.

I'd argue that a pixel-perfect font is "tied" to a range of pixel-per-inch monitors: a pixel-perfect font that's perfect for a 110 PPI monitor may neither work on a 90 PPI one nor on a 140 PPI+ one.

But yeah I'm a very happy camper. I obviously cannot distribute it as I "stole" a few characters from Monaco as is and just replaced them in my modded Terminus font.

Amazing! Thank you for sharing.

Analog Mono is no pixel font it is just a vector font drawn as if there where a raster

I like https://viznut.fi/unscii/ - meant for ascii art but still works well in a terminal, and still gets unicode updates

The 'fantasy' version reminds me of the Sleipnir font for Dwarf Fortress. Neat! http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/File:Andux_sleipnir_8...

This reminded of Wingdings font that I use to play around with in Windows 98

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.

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/tree/2.1.1f

* https://github.com/jdebp/funscii

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...

as a lover of low resolution software, we must acknowledge the goat, never surpassed since 2003: https://www.dafont.com/04b-03.font

nowadays all the alpha exists in making your software look like a cool fantasy tome: https://skeddles.itch.io/eldring-pro

That's 2 advanced for me ...

Only to be rivalled by the long-standing Elisa font (also from Japan, like the 04 font) https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/111533004449746944...

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.

[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20171103012446/http://dotsies.org...

scrambled my brain, but very cool

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.

It's pretty much MS Paint type experience. You get a grid and color pixels black or white. But you can move up/down grid sizes automatically and then you get to fix it at different grid sizes.

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.

It looks like a high-DPI X11 font to me. It isn't particularly original or unique.

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).

6x10 here. Even more text. Only readable because each pixel is completely distinct.

> 7x13 "misc fixed" font that comes with X11

Xorg here too but a modded (pixel-perfect) Terminus font.

> Geist Pixel isn’t a novelty font. It’s a system extension.

Okay LLM

To be fair, that's a direct quote from Vercel themselves introducing Geist Pixel: https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-geist-pixel

but what does that even mean?

ya because Vercel generated the copy with an LLM

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.

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.

I still use bullets extensively. You can easily tell when a human writes them when they are trees instead of lists.

I don't think even that is a reliable indicator because I'm currently reviewing an LLM generated bullet tree right now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I noticed the slop immediately and ejected it from by brain.

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.

Sarah Cadigan-Fried has designed some very cool modern pixel art fonts worth checking! https://www.soft-type.com/

There's an interesting symmetry between the knitting, perler bead and pixel art crowds.