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Discussion (108 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
Xorg here too but a modded (pixel-perfect) Terminus font.
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.
Okay LLM
Just like people used em dashes before LLMs.
I used bullet points heavily before LLMs.
I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.
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.
FontStruct: https://fontstruct.com/
Calligraphr: https://www.calligraphr.com/en/
Kreative Korp: https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/index.shtml#rela...
Glyphs: https://glyphsapp.com/learn/pixelfont
PixelForge: https://www.pixel-forge.com/
[1] https://imgur.com/a/0jcNGHv
You can see an older version ("a" has been revised to better center the letter) in action on a monochrome CRT here: https://github.com/PhobGCC/PhobGCC-doc/blob/main/For_Users/P...
[0] https://www.pixel-forge.com/
[1] https://itch.io/t/6384009/new-update-soon
Thanks!
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.
If there is any one particular hat who can sell controversy, its the typographer.
>fix it all the way to Helvetica
..
Akzidenz-Grotesk Helvetica || gtfo, nichtwa?
[0]: https://emehmedovic.com/sans_nouveaux/
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!_
https://www.dafont.com/perfect-dos-vga-437.font
https://x.com/TimoNoko/status/2030735635313545330
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.
Hm. Morse makes adding an ellipsis remarkably challenging!
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:
https://tanukifont.com/sango/
("sango" is coral in Japanese)
https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
https://departuremono.com/
You might also like https://commitmono.com/
https://tom7.org/fixedersys/
> ... it does have a few small problems, such as not working on modern computers ...
When connecting to this site in firefox says
> An error occurred during a connection to tom7.org. Peer attempted old style (potentially vulnerable) handshake.
The content of this (very good) video is the culprit for the error:
https://youtu.be/M1si1y5lvkk