A few interesting modern pixel fonts • Hacker News Board

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#101

Post by wunderlotus » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

namibj wrote: post #81

sambishop wrote: post #8

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

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

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#102

Post by tosti » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

gilrain wrote: post #87

RedNifre wrote: post #12

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.

> the whole point of sub pixels was to look sharp without looking colorful 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.

Same here. The MS-Windows boxes at college had lots of coral reef around the glyph edges

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#103

Post by tosti » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC

thechao wrote: post #89

Nition wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I came across your comment it was voted down to the point of being [dead]. I've vouched for it to bring it back; I thought it was very clever!

Maybe Morse is just "out", right now, in the geek population? I shall send out the signal for us to unite: ... ___ ... ___ ... Hm. Morse makes adding an ellipsis remarkably challenging!

Perhaps it'll get across if the message is in a bottle.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#104

Post by Surac » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

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.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#105

Post by TacticalCoder » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #98

fold_left wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#106

Post by TacticalCoder » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

Liskni_si wrote: post #79

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).

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

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

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#107

Post by Surac » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

Kerrick wrote: post #14

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 drawn as if there where a raster

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#108

Post by TacticalCoder » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

erickhill wrote: post #40

egeres wrote: post #38

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.

Old looms could make patterns and it's considered by many that the way to "encode" those different patterns was actually an early of programming.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#109

Post by agos » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

kristjansson wrote: post #55

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!_

I really want to like Pragmata Pro, but for such a price I'd like to see a couple more examples of the font used for programming! The website only has three tiny examples for Haskell, Agda, and APL (!). The tester from MonoLisa should be the benchmark here

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#110

Post by layer8 » Wed, May 27, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

thechao wrote: post #89

Nition wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I came across your comment it was voted down to the point of being [dead]. I've vouched for it to bring it back; I thought it was very clever!

Maybe Morse is just "out", right now, in the geek population? I shall send out the signal for us to unite: ... ___ ... ___ ... Hm. Morse makes adding an ellipsis remarkably challenging!

IMO Morse code misses the point, because it doesn’t depict letters, it encodes the abstract characters into completely different “glyphs”. In particular, knowing the English letters doesn’t make you understand Morse code the way it makes you able to read Two Slice; you need to know the mapping between letters and Morse code.

You can trivially encode any alphabet into a one-dimensional graphical encoding. But you couldn’t, for example, have a remotely intelligible two-pixel Chinese font in the way Two Slice demonstrates that you can have an English one.