alt Hacker NewsA few interesting modern pixel fonts
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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
Analog Mono is no pixel font. It is just a vector font using lines on as pixel like raster. I see this a littel bit as false advertising. TTF files can carry pixel fonts quite well but people seem dont know what a real pixel font is.
I like https://viznut.fi/unscii/ - meant for ascii art but still works well in a terminal, and still gets unicode updates
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).
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
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.
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 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.
> Geist Pixel isn’t a novelty font. It’s a system extension.
Okay LLM
There are also these somewhat classic-looking bitmap terminal fonts large enough for modern displays: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI
Sarah Cadigan-Fried has designed some very cool modern pixel art fonts worth checking! https://www.soft-type.com/
I made myself a pixel font for composite (well, monochrome) video output on an RP2040:
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.
Nice, I've been using ChevyRay fonts for a while (example: https://www.spritefusion.com/), they're great too!
Unrelated font joke.
Perfect DOS VGA 437 by Zeh Fernando is still one of my favourites.
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.
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.
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!_
>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.
My pixel font of choice is Sans Nouveaux[0] (requires Flash). It's MIT licensed too.
The numbers being rendered as the roman numerals in Two Slice is certainly clever. https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html
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.
> 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:
("sango" is coral in Japanese)
Two Slice is smaller than other tiny pixel fonts I've seen. Maybe the smallest legible font? Depends on your definition of legibility I guess.
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 :)
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.
These are awesome! Thanks for sharing, will definitely be using one of these
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.
if we are doing a survey, there is spleen which was adopted as the default console font for openbsd.
Coral Pixels is pretty nice with a lighter background, but unreadable with a dark one.
Very cool! Analog mono has a very “Christmas sweater” vibe.
Two Slice doesn’t seem readable, is there a Threeslice?
I'm a big fan of Departure Mono, very neat website design as well
Kumiko Yoshida should be brought before the war crimes tribunal or something. ClearType eyehurt is something that very much needs to stay in the past.
loving pixel geist.
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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.