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A few interesting modern pixel fonts

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Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#51

Post by hnlmorg »

flkiwi wrote: post #47
hnlmorg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#55

Post by kristjansson »

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!_

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#56

Post by IgorPartola »

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.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#59

Post by CarVac »

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.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#60

Post by jrdres »

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.

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