This is great! Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 2016 and isn't suitable for applications outside Terminal.app. But apparently someone else took up the mantle and rebuilt it to solve those issues and published it as creep2:
> I love romeovs's creep font, but I think you could only use it well in Apple's Terminal.app because it has negative line and character width spacing, which the font requires to be spaced correctly. The root cause of this appears to be because some glyphs are bigger than the 5px by 11px bounding box, causing most terminals to think a much bigger box is necessary for the general ASCII glyphs.
> In order to fix this issue, I manually hand painted all the glyphs from the 'creep' font in fontforge.
Awesome! I just wish creep2 added some of those sweet demo photos that are in the creep README.
2038: Fonts have subscription models. Times New Roman is a Windows exclusive and costs $12/month. There exists an open-source alternative to subscription fonts but it hasn't been updated in 2 years because the guy maintaining the repository is in jail for pirating Fast and Furious 18.
Hi everyone, quite unexpected to see this on the frontpage of Hacker News!
I made this so many years ago but I'm not using it myself anymore and I haven't been maintaining it.
I was (and am) also very inexperienced making fonts so the result was "good enough for my own limited use case" but too broken for general use, so it's good to see other people taking it and running with it, fixing my oversights and improving things.
This is fun. As I’m working on my little hobby project that is custom air quality meters I am using 128x64 screens that are about an inch on the diagonal. I ended up having to create a custom pixel font that would work for both 6pt and 8pt height plus some icons in each. It’s been a really fun experience and rewarding too.
Nitpick though -- by standard convention for terminal fonts shouldn't it be called a 5px wide font? (4px for the letterform, 1px in between.) Since they're sized according to the pixels available for each character.
I was really wondering how on earth letters would be clear with just 3px left for the letterform... :S
The $ is 5 pixel points, so I think this is a case of "px" being more of a term of art rather than actually being 4 pixels wide per letter. I think. Would appreciate clarification.
Honestly, this sucks and it renders the font useless for a lot of purposes. I wanted to use it in an embedded system, but that seems out of the question now.
It's just not mathematically possible to draw a proper "$" 4 pixels wide, since you need at least 2 pixels one each side of the vertical line to draw the enclosed areas.
Some of these can look like $ if they're really tiny, but generally you'll need a while to figure out what's they're supposed to mean if you don't know what you're looking for.
…and now I realized that even the ubiquitous IBM VGA 8x16 font does this! Single-pixel-wide counters would just look really bad, and even more bad on CRT monitors.
> I love you all, so please use this font as much as you like for free. However, I would like to make sure you provide others the same liberty in creep's new incarnations. Therefore creep is licensed under the MIT License.
Happy it’s permissively licensed under MIT, but I wonder if the author intended to use a sticky license instead.
A sticky license includes a clause stipulating that while you can modify the code and share your modifications, any modifications must also be shared under that same license. This is usually referred to as a “share alike” clause. GPL is an example of a license like this.
There are tiny Japanese fonts that support all Chinese characters. This means they have 7000+ characters with 8x8 (or even 6x8) grid, most of which are pretty legible IMO. It's amazing.
This is really cool! I always wondered if the japanese alphabet could be rendered like this. I found the hiragana and katakana characters to be easy to read but the kanji was really hard. I'm a beginner though...
>DonHopkins on Oct 4, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you rememb...
Who can possibly forget the font that Mike Koss's "The Terminal" Apple ][ terminal emulator used to get 32 lines of 70 characters each in HIRES graphics mode in 1981? It's the most difficult to read font I've ever used regularly! (Don't try using it on a color TV, though.)
>Created for the Apple II program The Terminal. Copyright (c) 1981 Michael C. Koss
>In 1981 I wrote a terminal emulator for the Apple II. At the time, the Apple II could only display upper case characters. I used the hi-res display (280 x 192 pixels!) to display my own character set. In order to come close to showing an 80-column display, I created a truly tiny font, displaying the full ASCII character set (upper and lower case).
>I created a font within a 3x5 pixel dimension, allowing the display of 32 lines of 70 characters each. The font definitely takes some training and getting used to (especially recognition of characters that use descenders); but I found it to be quite readable after a while.
If anyone's looking for a bitmap/pixel font that covers many symbols, including all necessary powerline symbols and a large portion of the various nerd font symbols, I can't recommend Cozette[0] enough. Recently the author has began updating and releasing new versions after a hiatus. Also, if you use the otf version of the font instead of the bitmap/otb version you can still get it to look like a pixel perfect bitmap font by setting the font to a specific size in the application, usually size 9 or 9.5 depending on the app or terminal.
The Spleen font has, among other sizes, the 5x8, which is pretty similar. It's the default for OpenBSD drm console, although using a different size. It's constantly being updated.
Nice and clean! I have been playing around the possibility to make a 2x3 bitmap font, but that turned out to be rather a cryptic constellation of pixels than a proper font: https://zserge.com/posts/tiny-font/
My eyes cannot sweep-read the result at all, and I also can't fully disambiguate enough characters in each word for the words to just "pop", even with effort.
An old DOS game Metaltech had a very nice 3x5 font, i even reverse-engineered it and used it in some of my lab projects in the university. It looked really neat on 320*200 resolution.
Exactly. They were trying to better differentiate from H but it just makes it more confusing. I saw a similar font with middle pixel gone from M wuth no problem telling it apart from H.
There are a fair amount of what you'll see described as 5px wide fonts, but are actually 4px wide. Just that every character has a blank column on the far right so that you can simplistically put chars one after the other.
So you sometimes have to actually look at, for example, the H or W glyph to see if they really mean "5px wide" or not.
Sorry, I actually meant 5px without the space, because the HN title here says 4px despite it actually being 5px if you include the space. The font I use is actually 6px wide (the 6x9 version).
Yes, as well as for the window titles and panel bars for system status and other things. The resolution I'm mostly using right now is 1366x768.
When I decided on that font I was using a netbook though, so the screen was quite smaller. The 5px font[1] allowed me to have terminals side-by-side on a tiling WM and still get 75 columns. Without it, I probably would have had to stick to seeing just one window at a time.
I've since stopped using a netbook, but I still like maxing out my screen/terminal real-state with it. Right now on the resolution I said it's letting me have 3 terminals of 75 columns side-by-side. Although, I normally just stick to 2 terminals of 113 columns for those times when lines go over 80.
Anyway, I find the font so crisp and readable that I've never felt a desire to change it. I'm getting a bit tempted by the font of this post, though.
[1] It's actually one of the 6px-wide ones, the 6x9 version, but that includes the space to separate characters. I said 5px to compare with the HN title which says 4px despite that not including the spacing.
With some VR HMDs, like Lenovo Explorer WMR, the strong lenses magnify pixels big enough to 'easily' see separately, in the clear center of the field of view. But don't provide many such clear pixels. So for editing code, using an HMD as non-VR terminal, I used tiny fonts (before switching to subpixel rendering of slightly larger fonts).
That's a good looking for for how narrow it is. Too small for my old eyes to make out clearly enough for regular use, but if your vision is sharp I can see the beauty of it.
Oh I actually made a compact font too, but it's 7x13 (most characters are 5px wide). Don't have a name for it yet. The first version was bitmap, but at some point I figured out how to make macOS render vector fonts pixel-perfectly and so made a vector version too.
My way of making it is questionable too — I drew characters as SVGs (because font editors suck way too much) and wrote a php script to convert them to an .sfd file that I could then open in FontForge and export in whatever format I want.
Looks an awful lot like some of the fonts that used to be quite common on early microcomputers from RadioShack, Commodore, Atari, even Apple. That said, there are some thoughtful additions: the lower case F and L are as elegant as the M is (necessarily) awkward.
Surprisingly readable! It seems quite usable if I move the screen a bit closer (at the wrist of my extended arm), but it gives me eyestrain at my preferred distance (at the tip of the fingers). Maybe I need better glasses... or better eyes. :/
Looks exactly like all the tonnes of 4 and 5px wide fonts commonly seen on home computer systems from the 80s and 90s with relatively low resolution, like the Amiga, Atari ST etc.
The Amiga doesn't have a character mode. It does what you ask it in full bitmap mode. Many games, applications and more, made better use of limited screen real estate by using 4, 5 and 6 px wide fonts.
It's definitely niche, and I seem to recall some really interesting fonts that did interesting things that encouraged some really wacky and neat projects, but I can't recall names...
https://github.com/raymond-w-ko/creep2
> I love romeovs's creep font, but I think you could only use it well in Apple's Terminal.app because it has negative line and character width spacing, which the font requires to be spaced correctly. The root cause of this appears to be because some glyphs are bigger than the 5px by 11px bounding box, causing most terminals to think a much bigger box is necessary for the general ASCII glyphs.
> In order to fix this issue, I manually hand painted all the glyphs from the 'creep' font in fontforge.
Awesome! I just wish creep2 added some of those sweet demo photos that are in the creep README.