A few interesting modern pixel fonts • Hacker News Board

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#61

Post by Nition » Wed, May 27, 2026, 2:58 AM UTC

thechao wrote: post #37

modeless wrote: post #28

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.

_ .... . ... .... ___ ._. _ . ... _ .._. ___ _. _ .__ ___ .._ ._.. _.. _... . ._ __ ___ ._. ... . _._. ___ _.. . .._. ___ _. _ ._._._

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!

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#62

Post by sublinear » Wed, May 27, 2026, 3:00 AM UTC

hnlmorg wrote: post #39

sublinear wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use bullets extensively. You can easily tell when a human writes them when they are trees instead of lists.

I don't think even that is a reliable indicator because I'm currently reviewing an LLM generated bullet tree right now.

Oh interesting. Before the LLM craze, I only ever saw good bullet trees in legalese and git commit messages. The trainwrecks were far more likely to be the rare attempt by HR in a big email or in the odd Jira epic by a PM.

I wouldn't think LLMs would have much to train on. I still see some bad ones, but I don't feel like the quality ratio or overall quantity has changed. I do see more bullet lists though.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#63

Post by omoikane » Wed, May 27, 2026, 3:27 AM UTC

> 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:

https://tanukifont.com/sango/

("sango" is coral in Japanese)

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#64

Post by keyle » Wed, May 27, 2026, 3:54 AM UTC

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 :)

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#65

Post by frankling_ » Wed, May 27, 2026, 3:57 AM UTC

There are also these somewhat classic-looking bitmap terminal fonts large enough for modern displays: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#66

Post by mindslight » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:11 AM UTC

fsckboy wrote: post #19

> 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…

Honestly I was just trying to figure out how many lines of text I could cram onto a small OLED display, and came to the conclusion that the descenders were an unnecessary waste of space. 2+ pixels of vertical space wasted for 5 glyphs! So my heart goes out to VCR OSD Mono.

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#67

Post by gfat » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #42

I'm a big fan of Departure Mono, very neat website design as well https://departuremono.com/

This one and its site are gorgeous.

You might also like https://commitmono.com/

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#68

Post by thristian » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:19 AM UTC

rebolek wrote: post #4

I want better Topaz. My favourite font.

It's not exactly a better Topaz, but I made Topaz Unicode to be more Topaz: https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/topaz-unicode

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#69

Post by cocodill » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:29 AM UTC

CarVac wrote: post #59

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 qu…

Quite impressive [1]. Did you base it on a specific font, or did you just draw it however you felt like?

[1] https://imgur.com/a/0jcNGHv

Re: A few interesting modern pixel fonts

#70

Post by CarVac » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:08 AM UTC

cocodill wrote: post #69

CarVac wrote: post #59

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 qu…

Quite impressive [1]. Did you base it on a specific font, or did you just draw it however you felt like? [1] https://imgur.com/a/0jcNGHv

I did it with no reference to other fonts, just to my own tastes. It took a bit of iteration to get letter centering on the lower cases to work well but I think it's in a good place.

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...