>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It feels like the one used in the Papers, Please video game.
Beautiful! Thank you!
Geist looks like unadulterated garbage, a sloppy rendition of a vector font onto a pixel grid, lack of character and care to banding and shape...
I like https://viznut.fi/unscii/ - meant for ascii art but still works well in a terminal, and still gets unicode updates
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
That's 2 advanced for me ...
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.
All technology, no matter how undesirable it once felt, eventually becomes nostalgic for somebody.
Depends on the DPI of your monitor and your glasses prescription.
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.
Previous discussion (124 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236263
> Geist Pixel isn’t a novelty font. It’s a system extension.
Okay LLM
To be fair, that's a direct quote from Vercel themselves introducing Geist Pixel: https://vercel.com/blog/introducing-geist-pixel
ya because Vercel generated the copy with an LLM
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.
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.
For sure, but I don't think I'm going to give Vercel benefit of the doubt that they aren't writing their copy with an LLM.
I still use bullets extensively. You can easily tell when a human writes them when they are trees instead of lists.
but what does that even mean?
My pixel font of choice is Sans Nouveaux[0] (requires Flash). It's MIT licensed too.
[0]: https://emehmedovic.com/sans_nouveaux/
Also here at DaFont: https://www.dafont.com/px-sans-nouveaux.font
Two Slice is shockingly readable.
got caught up on decoding 'tends'
I want better Topaz. My favourite font.
I still use it (sometimes 1.x, sometimes 2.x) in terminals and IDEs to this day
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.
Kumiko Yoshida should be brought before the war crimes tribunal or something. ClearType eyehurt is something that very much needs to stay in the past.
loving pixel geist.