AN 8×8 PIXEL FONT.
THIS FONT CONTAINS THE LATIN, GREEK, CYRILLIC, ARABIC, AND HEBREW ALPHABETS.
CHANGELOG
• 2018:02:10 — FIRST RELEASE WITH SIX HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE CHARACTERS.
This is a clone of PARALLAX-SYSTEM-FONT-1Painstakingly redone from movie screenshots.
Characters guessed: b j q x z " ! @ _ $ + ; [ \ ] ` ~
The ^ caret character is an upward pointing arrow, and is shown in the movie. This is correct based on the old ASCII-1963 standard, where ^ and _ were an upward and leftward pointing arrow, respectively.
I don't believe this font actually matches any specific contemporary terminal from the mid 70s to early 80s, I believe it was done custom for the movie. It is clearly inspired by the character set from several terminals.
One notable feature of the font (shared with several CRT terminals in the 1970s and 1980s) is that no more than 8 adjacent vertical rows within the 7*x10 character cell can be active at any given point. The 'block cursor' violates this, but the circuitry to display that was separate from the circuitry to read the character ROM and shift it vertically.
* Technically the character is 8 pixels wide, but if the 8th/leftmost pixel is set, it will apparently also appear as the rightmost '9th' pixel in the inter-character column, which is undesirable.This can be seen in the custom character set in the movie used for the country outlines during the "UNITED STATES" "SOVIET UNION" "WHICH SIDE DO YOU WANT?" scene. (Either that, or this was an accidental error during creation of those custom characters for the movie.)
The movie also often uses an "overline" character in order to underline the row above, and this occupies an entire row of characters on screen when this happens. Is this the true 'shape' of the underline character?
Painstakingly redone from movie screenshots.
Characters guessed: b j q x z " ! @ _ $ + ; [ \ ] ` ~
The ^ caret character is an upward pointing arrow, and is shown in the movie. This is correct based on the old ASCII-1963 standard, where ^ and _ were an upward and leftward pointing arrow, respectively.
I don't believe this font actually matches any specific contemporary terminal from the mid 70s to early 80s, I believe it was done custom for the movie. It is clearly inspired by the character set from several terminals.
One notable feature of the font (shared with several CRT terminals in the 1970s and 1980s) is that no more than 8 adjacent vertical rows within the 7*x10 character cell can be active at any given point. The 'block cursor' violates this, but the circuitry to display that was separate from the circuitry to read the character ROM and shift it vertically.
* Technically the character is 8 pixels wide, but if the 8th/leftmost pixel is set, it will apparently also appear as the rightmost '9th' pixel in the inter-character column, which is undesirable.This can be seen in the custom character set in the movie used for the country outlines during the "UNITED STATES" "SOVIET UNION" "WHICH SIDE DO YOU WANT?" scene. (Either that, or this was an accidental error during creation of those custom characters for the movie.)
The movie also often uses an "overline" character in order to underline the row above, and this occupies an entire row of characters on screen when this happens. Is this the true 'shape' of the underline character?
This is a clone of WOPR Terminala font inspired by terminals and OOBE. some characters are sans-serif, some are serif... this is basically a semi-serif font. this font has no inspiration. when i say that, i mean that this font is not used in any terminals and OOBEs. i just thought of this style.
(Work in Progress)
This is a larger variation of my smaller 8-bit Nostalgia series, and assumes 16pt rendering. It's inspired in large part by the computers from my past: the Commodore 64, Atari, and IBM PC. In many ways, this font is closer to the font used for VGA text -- this font is on an 8x16 grid, while the VGA used a 9x16 grid. However, the VGA font has more letters with serifs, while this font avoids that whenever possible (aside from the typical I/i, L/l, J/j). Only a few other glyphs get serifs when they wouldn't otherwise need it to appear reasonably well-kerned.
This font uses an 8x16 pixel grid. The top three rows are reserved for ascenders and diacritics. The bottom four rows are reserved for descenders. This leaves nine rows for the capital forms, and seven rows for the lowercase forms.
Notable glyphs:
- The "A" and "V" is angled a bit more than usual in a font of this type.
- The "B" has a narrower top half in order to offset the fact that the top and bottom are equal height.
- "J" more closely resembles its lowercase form.
- "g" is a double-story form.
- "3", "4", "5", "6", "9" numerals are fairly unique forms
An attempt to make an entire alphabet by modifying a single heptagon shape. (The "O" is the basis for almost all other glyphs.)
An alternate version of this was made in which I used different bricks to make the width of every line homogeneous. However, it was found that this robbed the font of much of its character. Additionally, the visual effect presented by the increased line width actually made the font less even-looking than it is now. This proved true with and without antialiasing.
A 3x3 microfont from the Virtual Gremlin, an old game of mine. This is designed to look tiny and indistinct. Useful when writing jargon, placeholder text, or technobabble (the kind of meaningless information you'd write when drawing a newspaper or computer terminal).
VERSION HISTORY:
08 Feb 2018 - v1.0 declared finished.
Official font of AMFA (formerly ATMA), the main rival of MARENGI Omnisystems in Endless Sea Of Stars. Appears throughout my games (especially those using the ESOS and ESOS-Lite engines) and is used as the main font of ESOS Terminal A (the one doing the super-long survey).
Between 2012 and 2014, ESOS Journey-Depth AI entities collaborated to produce this specific arrangement of pixels as the most legible form of 1px wide, monochrome 8x8 Latin for electro-optical systems (Marinan Interpretability Value 9.29).
This font is useful if you want to write some really efficient text recognition software for a robot with a camera, or if you want a pixel font which elicits a high degree of reading accuracy. Some would argue that the uppercase makes it less readable, but you'll be hard pressed to find another font that is THIS readable in uppercase only!
This is a cloneThe main font used by MARENGI Omnisystems in my video game series, "Endless Sea Of Stars". These letterforms can be found engraved into or projected onto practically every piece of MO technology. This script was designed in 2011 to be suitable for printing, logo design, art, and many other purposes. It lacks the constant height which most of my other pixel fonts have, but makes up for it with its bookish appearance.
Unfortunately, replicating the exact design of the antialiased version of this font is impossible, not only on FontStruct, but on all software other than ESOSVM. This is because ESOSVM uses a custom renderer which makes use of proprietary techniques. Marengi HD comes close, but not very.
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Versioning:
2.6 (19Aug2018) - "bdďđ" were perfected. Space width reduced.
2.5 (20Jul2018) - "IÌÍÎÏø" were perfected and massive kerning work began.
2.4 (15Jul2018) - "J" was perfected and several letterwidths were altered.
2.3 (18May2018) - "hnru34679ÀÁÂÃÅÈÉÊÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕØÙÚÛÝÞßàáâãåæçèéêìíîïñòóôõøùúûý" were perfected.
2.2 (17May2018) - ":;gjty%/\ÂÆÊÎÔÛâæêîôû¼½¾" were edited for more consistency and readability.
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MIV: 8.74
Original size: 11pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
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The 5x5 pixel font used for the Virtual Gremlin, an old emulator/game I wrote. The standard font for ingame text.
This font was also designed to work well with IRC clients and ASCII games (see sample).
Breaking the 5x5 grid was unfortunate but necessary in order to make legible characters in non-Latin languages.
A 2x2 design which started with a "split" aesthetic and ended up with a "stenciled" one. I embraced the change and now all these glyphs are functional as stencils. They contain minimal stacking and no composites.
In some cases the inside is connected to the outside at only one point. If you decide to use this for stencilling, I recommend using a stout material for the stencil and storing it with care.
The name comes from one of the many, many old joke bands which I created.
Recommended: Use with kerning turned on!
For this font I decided to do several things I almost never do with other pixel fonts.
First is the use of an 8*8 grid. I consider this size tough to work with so I tend to stay away from it, preferring X*7 or X*9.
Second is the rounding or softening of all 90° angles. 3- and 4- way intersections are exempt from this rule. However, some other acute angles were rounded as well.
Third is kerning, which helps ease this font back into microfont territory a bit by reducing excess space. I usually design pixel fonts so they don't need this, but not this time!
Fourth is the embrace of asymmetry throughout most letterforms, which is almost a natural consequence of making a font on the 8*8 grid.
Fifth is extending MmWw. I usually try to truncate these letters to fit my grid. Sometimes I make a symmetrical design for them, but this time I just let 'em sprawl.
Despite all these differences in methodology, I think this font looks rather like a hybrid of "Marengi" and "AMFA". Very pleased with the result!
Marengi Serif. It's like Marengi, but with serifs!
The serifs give this a wider, more open/airy feeling. Slightly less readable than original Marengi, but slightly more pleasing to look at.
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MIV: 7.85
Original size: 11pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
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This is a clone of MarengiLowercase only!
This font used to be the lowercase for Spacekapitan. I cloned Spacekapitan so I could keep this, then reworked Spacekapitan into what it is now. Then I continued working on this font to make it the best it could be, and here we see the result. It has almost nothing but 90-degree angles.
This is mostly built around a 5x5 square which makes its way into most glyphs in some way or another.
I think this would make a good companion font for "Your Quota".
This is a clone of SpacekapitanAnother 5x5 pixel design. This one splits one line or intersection per letter for most letters, leading to a tech/sci-fi look.
Only the comma is allowed to go below the line; all other glyphs fit onto the 5x5 grid. Because this font is quantized to the grid, diacritic accents won't be possible. Feel free to move the comma above the line to suit your global matrix.
Original size: 3.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
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See also: Byzantine Exasperation
A minimalist Gemscript (or a corrupted one, depending on who you ask).
It has no relation to Pigpen Cipher, although a few glyphs do look like they're from that cipher. Feel free to use this fact to throw amateur cryptographers off for amusement.
Original size: 3.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
I came up with an original high-res design, then brickswapped to turn everything into square bricks. The result sort of reminds me of Proxima Punch Pixel Squared, but less art deco and more computer-esque. It has a really old and naive look to it which could make it good for retro-terminal use.
"Buttons Foe" = "Obtuse Font". Not only is it an obtuse font in look and construction, it's reminescent of an era when computers were thought of as adversarial, magic voodoo boxes. So both the name and the anagram are equally applicable. :^)
A mostly-4x5 design made for legibility, aesthetics, and an almost authoritarian regularity. This makes it suited for comics, tutorials, general reading, and more. It can be easily read at its original size with the same effort it would take to read a high-res design of the same size.
This design has been tested and reported to make an excellent font for IRC and other chat clients!
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Original size: 4.5pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)