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.
Many many years ago I wrote a book for Apress, and the style guide for that instilled in me a lot of practices that now make my writing feel LLM-ish to some readers:
- Use bulleted lists, but always introduce and conclude a list with prose; a list can't immediately follow a heading or end a section.
- Use a mix of long and short sentences; in long sentences with parentheticals, use a mix of commas, parens, semicolons, and em dashes.
- With multiple continuous blocks of prose that aren't naturally broken up by an illustration or heading, start a paragraph with an inline bold statement to help anchor the reader.
I felt personally attacked when LLMs came out: I'm an avid user of "—", bullets, numbered lists, and the word "delve". It's been a miserable couple of years.
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.
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.
Oooh, you mean people turned on sub pixel rendering while running their screen at a non-native resolution and thus got these colors all the time? Yeah, I guess that could cause nostalgia.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
The first font on the page mentions raising up descenders (g j p q y) so that pixels don't go below the baseline. You can often find characters with minimal descenders in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, or Korean) fonts. Sometimes a raised-descender version is found among the fullwidth-form letters.
>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. 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.
Hey .. you do need to know that font people regularly reference each other like this .. its kind of a thing in typography, and its a means of demonstrating inspiration and lineage, more than anything else - calling out ones inspiration, in fact.
If there is any one particular hat who can sell controversy, its the typographer.
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.
So, Analog Mono and Geist both have enough pixels per glyph that they don't really read as pixel fonts below sizes of ~20px. Analog kinda aleviates that by being made up of big (overlapping) blocks of 2x2 pixels. Geist just kinda looks like a downscaled vector font (to me) though.
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.
There was a talk at a Linux conference a while back relating knitting to programming and I’ve yet to watch it because the audio on YT wasn’t great but it’s on my list.
I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.
I find our human need to embrace nostalgia interesting. That we would design blocky “pixel fonts” in vector formats so that we can scale and resize them is quite ironic.
I am very fond of Gohu font. I have used it on a recent static blog formatting adventure http://dntbl.ink , converted to woff2. I couldn't be happier with how it renders and gives that VAX feel.
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
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.
What's the experience with Font Forge for creating pixel fonts? I have never used it but I always assumed that a font creation tool made for arbitrary style "vector" fonts is probably unwieldy if all you want is square pixels, to be rendered pixel-perfect, etc.
It's pretty much MS Paint type experience. You get a grid and color pixels black or white. But you can move up/down grid sizes automatically and then you get to fix it at different grid sizes.
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.
I made PixelForge [0] a while ago just for creating pixel fonts and being able to export to TTF. I had it semi-abandoned for a few years, but I'm about to release a new version in the next few days! [1]
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.
It's not that forgotten, for example int10h font collection (which probably is the biggest bitmap font resource) prominently shows aspect-ratio corrections for the fonts https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
Square pixels were certainly not an innovation of the Macintosh. The earliest raster scan workstation I'm aware of is the Alto, released in 1973. It and the ones that came after it like the Star and Dorado all had square pixels. So did the early 1980s engineering workstations like Apollo and Sun, which also came out before Macintosh.
I think the Amiga is the most well-known example of what OP means. Older home computers which could be connected to TVs generally had resolutions up to 320x200 (or x240 for PAL) and square pixels. The Amiga could double that on both axes to 640x400/480, but because of the interlaced display of typical TVs/TV-based monitors, that would flicker so bad that it made productive working impossible. So the default resolution used by AmigaOS was 640x200/240, and the fonts were optimized for that.
Even in the PC world, the most common resolution in for CGA, EGA, and VGA remained 320x200 for many years. With square pixels, this would be 16:10, but the usual case was that this resolution was displayed fullscreen on a 4:3 display, so individual pixels would have an aspect ratio of 5:6.
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.
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 :)
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).
People are using vector formats to imitate bitmap fonts? What is the world coming to?
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.
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.
MrClouds | a day ago
Boltgolt | a day ago
Okay LLM
sphars | a day ago
FarmerPotato | 22 hours ago
wyre | 22 hours ago
hnlmorg | 21 hours ago
Just like people used em dashes before LLMs.
I used bullet points heavily before LLMs.
wyre | 21 hours ago
sublinear | 21 hours ago
hnlmorg | 20 hours ago
sublinear | 15 hours ago
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.
mikepurvis | 21 hours ago
- Use bulleted lists, but always introduce and conclude a list with prose; a list can't immediately follow a heading or end a section.
- Use a mix of long and short sentences; in long sentences with parentheticals, use a mix of commas, parens, semicolons, and em dashes.
- With multiple continuous blocks of prose that aren't naturally broken up by an illustration or heading, start a paragraph with an inline bold statement to help anchor the reader.
thechao | 20 hours ago
flkiwi | 19 hours ago
hnlmorg | 19 hours ago
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.
nnevatie | 4 hours ago
rebolek | a day ago
LocalH | 23 hours ago
thristian | 14 hours ago
sssilver | a day ago
jareklupinski | 23 hours ago
bitwize | 23 hours ago
sambishop | 23 hours ago
nowadays all the alpha exists in making your software look like a cool fantasy tome: https://skeddles.itch.io/eldring-pro
datawars | 22 hours ago
msephton | 19 hours ago
namibj | 7 hours ago
[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20171103012446/http://dotsies.org...
wunderlotus | 2 hours ago
efskap | 23 hours ago
co-ent | 19 hours ago
sheept | 23 hours ago
[0]: https://emehmedovic.com/sans_nouveaux/
vibbix | 21 hours ago
RedNifre | 23 hours ago
zeckalpha | 22 hours ago
RedNifre | 3 hours ago
Thanks!
blt | 22 hours ago
gilrain | 6 hours ago
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.
tosti | an hour ago
Kerrick | 23 hours ago
bbx | 22 hours ago
datawars | 22 hours ago
fold_left | 21 hours ago
KronisLV | 3 hours ago
TacticalCoder | an hour ago
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.
arttaboi | 12 hours ago
Surac | an hour ago
Dwedit | 22 hours ago
fsckboy | 22 hours ago
"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.
rigonkulous | 19 hours ago
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?
mindslight | 14 hours ago
evrimoztamur | 22 hours ago
Fraterkes | 21 hours ago
kevin_thibedeau | 20 hours ago
modeless | 21 hours ago
layer8 | 21 hours ago
thechao | 20 hours ago
Nition | 15 hours ago
thechao | 4 hours ago
Hm. Morse makes adding an ellipsis remarkably challenging!
tosti | an hour ago
layer8 | 18 minutes ago
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.
egeres | 20 hours ago
erickhill | 20 hours ago
rigonkulous | 19 hours ago
phatskat | 19 hours ago
I find knitting very soothing, and it also scratches the same itch as programming.
TacticalCoder | an hour ago
Barrin92 | 20 hours ago
https://departuremono.com/
gfat | 14 hours ago
You might also like https://commitmono.com/
cui511511 | 11 hours ago
drob518 | 19 hours ago
achr2 | 19 hours ago
chupchap | 19 hours ago
Minor49er | 4 hours ago
meetingslop | 18 hours ago
kristjansson | 18 hours ago
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!_
agos | an hour ago
IgorPartola | 18 hours ago
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.
slazaro | 4 hours ago
IgorPartola | 3 hours ago
somat | 17 hours ago
https://www.cambus.net/spleen-monospaced-bitmap-fonts/
sota_pop | 16 hours ago
CarVac | 16 hours ago
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.
cocodill | 13 hours ago
[1] https://imgur.com/a/0jcNGHv
ianstormtaylor | 11 hours ago
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/
slazaro | 9 hours ago
[0] https://www.pixel-forge.com/
[1] https://itch.io/t/6384009/new-update-soon
jrdres | 15 hours ago
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.
zokier | 7 hours ago
dn3500 | 4 hours ago
rob74 | 4 hours ago
Gormo | 3 hours ago
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.
omoikane | 14 hours ago
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)
keyle | 14 hours ago
frankling_ | 14 hours ago
WesSouza | 9 hours ago
https://www.dafont.com/perfect-dos-vga-437.font
timonoko | 8 hours ago
https://x.com/TimoNoko/status/2030735635313545330
nph278 | 8 hours ago
https://tom7.org/fixedersys/
SahAssar | 8 hours ago
> ... 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.
pillmillipedes | 8 hours ago
Liskni_si | 8 hours ago
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).
upofadown | 2 hours ago
TacticalCoder | an hour ago
Xorg here too but a modded (pixel-perfect) Terminus font.
kristianp | 7 hours ago
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.
a1o | 6 hours ago
Gotoorbitapp | 5 hours ago
HugoDz | 4 hours ago
Surac | an hour ago