This font is a recreation of Richard Wisan's "ELITEQ.LQN" font file (c) 1990 for use with the program LQMATRIX. From Mr. Wisan's comment in the LQMATRIX documentation file: "ELITEQ.LQN: resembles Epson's resident Roman font, but slightly reduced to suit elite spacing."
LQMATRIX was a font design program for use with Epson LQ [Letter Quality] 24-pin dot matrix printers and compatibles. Created by noted linguist, anthropologist, and photographer J. David Sapir, the program had its beginnings in 1985 and was published by Jimmy Paris Software; the last known version that I have been able to find is version 4.44 (1991). Mr. Sapir included font set submissions from LQMATRIX users in some of the later updates; my version includes Mr. Wisan's file. A screenshot of the program is included in the comments section below.
While the graphics mode of dot matrix printers could print rather complex pictures, it remained extremely slow for large amounts of specialized text. By uploading an LQMATRIX font file into the printer's RAM, the temporary font could be used interchangeablely with the printer's resident ROM fonts. The result was a much faster print speed with little sacrifice in quality -- plus, one could design their own special glyphs or characters to suit their needs!
This was accomplish by a sophisticated design program included with LQMATRIX, whereby users could create and save characters or symbols on a 24 vertical by 15 horizontal grid for the ASCII locations 032–126 (although 001-127 were permitted). One could even place dots in the 14 half-positions along the horizontal.
I have cleaned-up some of the curvatures and harmonized a number of glyphs (along with outright modification of a few, like W and w), yet they still adhere to the same 24 x 15 grid. The original designs can be found beginning in the "More Latin" section. Because the characters for "left single quotation mark" and "right single quotation mark" were not present in DOS, I have "created" them here for sake of completion.
Inspired mainly by matrix screens on buses around the UK, especially iBus in London.
LOG
(7 Jul 2023, 11.12am) - Officially published, with Latin letters, numbers and punctuation.
(7 Jul 2023, 12.18pm) - Added some extended Latin letters, including support for Czech, Hungarian, Turkish and Polish.
NOTE: This project was previously privated and has already been done/left unfinished a long time ago.
I'm only making this project public and open-source it to clean out my dumpster of (complete, incomplete and discontinued) privated fonts.
(Side note: It's so nostalgic looking back at this project that I started more than a year ago. Gosh, reminds me of how bad I used to draw bold pixel fonts like this one. Please don't actually use this though, I swear it looks so bad when you try the font out.)
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A bold matrix font, inspired by Helvetica and MS Sans Serif. Also can be known as my Pixel-Optimzed version of Helvetica Bold.