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Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

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Re: Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

#101
post #32
post #9

Wow. I've been using 5px wide Fixed[1] for years because I'd never seen another font that is as readable that small, but this seems pretty nice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface)

Do you use 5px as your primary terminal/editor font size? What sort of screen/resolution do you use?

Yes, as well as for the window titles and panel bars for system status and other things. The resolution I'm mostly using right now is 1366x768.

When I decided on that font I was using a netbook though, so the screen was quite smaller. The 5px font[1] allowed me to have terminals side-by-side on a tiling WM and still get 75 columns. Without it, I probably would have had to stick to seeing just one window at a time.

I've since stopped using a netbook, but I still like maxing out my screen/terminal real-state with it. Right now on the resolution I said it's letting me have 3 terminals of 75 columns side-by-side. Although, I normally just stick to 2 terminals of 113 columns for those times when lines go over 80.

Anyway, I find the font so crisp and readable that I've never felt a desire to change it. I'm getting a bit tempted by the font of this post, though.

[1] It's actually one of the 6px-wide ones, the 6x9 version, but that includes the space to separate characters. I said 5px to compare with the HN title which says 4px despite that not including the spacing.

Re: Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

#102
post #14
post #9

Wow. I've been using 5px wide Fixed[1] for years because I'd never seen another font that is as readable that small, but this seems pretty nice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface)

There are a fair amount of what you'll see described as 5px wide fonts, but are actually 4px wide. Just that every character has a blank column on the far right so that you can simplistically put chars one after the other. So you sometimes have to actually look at, for example, the H or W glyph to see if they really mean "5px wide" or not. This image, for example, is the "5x8 Spleen" font. If you zoom in, though, you…

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Re: Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

#103
post #48
post #9

Wow. I've been using 5px wide Fixed[1] for years because I'd never seen another font that is as readable that small, but this seems pretty nice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface)

There's a font called Flea's Knees that's sort-of 3 pixels wide. The pixels are different colors and it relies on LCD subpixel spacing to create the light-and-dark patterns. https://web.archive.org/web/20190705030013/http://www.typoph...

That's very interesting. I've never heard of subpixels being used to make fonts extremely small.

Re: Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

#104
post #14
post #9

Wow. I've been using 5px wide Fixed[1] for years because I'd never seen another font that is as readable that small, but this seems pretty nice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface)

There are a fair amount of what you'll see described as 5px wide fonts, but are actually 4px wide. Just that every character has a blank column on the far right so that you can simplistically put chars one after the other. So you sometimes have to actually look at, for example, the H or W glyph to see if they really mean "5px wide" or not. This image, for example, is the "5x8 Spleen" font. If you zoom in, though, you…

Sorry, I actually meant 5px without the space, because the HN title here says 4px despite it actually being 5px if you include the space. The font I use is actually 6px wide (the 6x9 version).

Re: Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

#105
post #69
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some glyphs are bigger than the 5px by 11px bounding box Out of curiosity, which ones? Did anyone find them?

Looks like the $ sign is 5px wide if you look at the image.

True! I see it now. Looks like # and + too.

Re: Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

#106

Slight tangent: Does anyone know what software this project is using to design this? I couldn't easily tell from their file extensions. Or rather, do people have general recommendations for good, open source, font designing software on a standard Linux machine?

Fontforge [0] seems to be the one that I've heard about and even played with a bit in the past. [0] https://fontforge.org/en-US/

Yep! I build this font in FontForge. Such a simple pice of software.

Re: Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

#107

This is great! Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 2016 and isn't suitable for applications outside Terminal.app. But apparently someone else took up the mantle and rebuilt it to solve those issues and published it as creep2: https://github.com/raymond-w-ko/creep2 > I love romeovs's creep font, but I think you could only use it well in Apple's Terminal.app because it has negative line and character width spac…

Does a font really need regular updates? But it's probably possible to convert Mac fonts somehow

2038: Fonts have subscription models. Times New Roman is a Windows exclusive and costs $12/month. There exists an open-source alternative to subscription fonts but it hasn't been updated in 2 years because the guy maintaining the repository is in jail for pirating Fast and Furious 18.

Re: Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not great, but definitely not ‘terrible’. Besides, how could you possibly do a better job given the constraints?

I'd remove the top middle pixel. # # ### # # # #

Exactly. They were trying to better differentiate from H but it just makes it more confusing. I saw a similar font with middle pixel gone from M wuth no problem telling it apart from H.
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