[HN Gopher] Creep - a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font
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Creep - a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font
Author : pabs3
Score : 475 points
Date : 2021-07-09 23:39 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| beiller wrote:
| Question is the hash symbol (#) 4 pixels wide possible? I saw it
| there but it seems to me it requires at least 5 pixels.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Many characters "require" at least 5 pixels in both axes unless
| you take some creative liberties: W and E are the obvious ones.
| [deleted]
| infofarmer wrote:
| > 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| What's a sticky licence?
| keawade wrote:
| 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Isn't that called 'copyleft'? I'm not sure 'sticky' is a
| common term.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Certainly not a term I've heard used to refer to licenses
| but it sounds less political than copyleft and I found it
| immediately understandable.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| nayuki wrote:
| This reminds me of Microsoft Nina, a narrow font designed for
| Pocket PC.
| historyloop wrote:
| We need to go back to fixed width all caps green text on black
| background for everything.
|
| Eventually blue text on black background, but that's as far as I
| want to go.
| dublin wrote:
| 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.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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.
| malux85 wrote:
| This project sounds cool, I'd love to see a blog post about it
| and some pictures!
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I'll post it to HN when I put it all together.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Love it! Gonna use it on my termimal. Wish we had a font like
| this with full unicode support too.
| tooltower wrote:
| Slight tangent: Does anyone know what software this project is
| using to design this? I couldn't easily tell from their file
| extensions.
|
| Or rather, do people have general recommendations for good, open
| source, font designing software on a standard Linux machine?
| basilgohar wrote:
| Fontforge [0] seems to be the one that I've heard about and
| even played with a bit in the past.
|
| [0] https://fontforge.org/en-US/
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| The Pico-8 has a 3-pixel wide font, desinged to be used with a
| 128x128 pixel IDE:
|
| https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3760
| infogulch wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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.
| vletal wrote:
| Thanks for the link! My tiny little display attached to RPi is
| very much looking forward to trying it out.
| phinnaeus wrote:
| Awesome use case, thanks for the idea!
| thih9 wrote:
| > some glyphs are bigger than the 5px by 11px bounding box
|
| Out of curiosity, which ones? Did anyone find them?
| baxuz wrote:
| Looks like the $ sign is 5px wide if you look at the image.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Does a font really need regular updates?
|
| But it's probably possible to convert Mac fonts somehow
| codelord wrote:
| This is great. Thanks for sharing.
| sxp wrote:
| Another tiny font is the 3x4 one used by PICO-8:
| https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3760
| 83457 wrote:
| the M is terrible. I wish that would be fixed
| pindab0ter wrote:
| It's not great, but definitely not 'terrible'. Besides, how
| could you possibly do a better job given the constraints?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'd remove the top middle pixel. # #
| ### # # # #
| Steko wrote:
| Maybe go with mu instead.
| haolez wrote:
| This should look good in NetHack. The box drawings look nice!
| kls0e wrote:
| The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack (v2.2) by VileR:
|
| https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Now that just makes me feel old. Would have loved this when I was
| younger. Presbyopia is no fun.
| dbolgheroni wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/fcambus/spleen
| adamrezich wrote:
| so this is only for OSX?
| Johnny555 wrote:
| You should be able to use this on any operating system that can
| use (or convert) .bdf font files.
|
| For example:
|
| https://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/Tech/font-howto.html
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Quite the opposite; Xorg can handle BDF fonts natively.
|
| Of course in modern applications, the client renders the font,
| so see e.g. https://gabusc.us/posts/bitmap-fonts-on-linux/ for
| how to set that up
| pantalaimon wrote:
| so tldr: covert the font to OpenType for it to work with a
| recent version of pango?
| jokoon wrote:
| Not a monospace font, but I made this:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/G5hDiP6
| delgaudm wrote:
| 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.
| avmich wrote:
| This - https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4.html - is 4px wide
| font. Creep would be considered 5px wide.
| romeovs wrote:
| 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.
|
| Questions or suggestions are more than welcome.
| Valodim wrote:
| > good to see other people taking it and running with it,
| fixing my oversights and improving things
|
| The readme looks so polished that I was surprised about this.
| Perhaps add a note to this effect at the top, maybe point to
| one of the forks?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| This reminds me of Tasword Two, a word processor for the ZX
| Spectrum. It used a custom font to fit twice as many characters
| per line.
|
| https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/software/utilities/taswo...
| zserge wrote:
| 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/
| jerrre wrote:
| Nice experiment! Would be nice to see some example text in the
| end..
| exikyut wrote:
| There's a jsfiddle link to semi-interactive demo at the end
| of the article: https://jsfiddle.net/4urdtahx/
|
| 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.
| euske wrote:
| 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.
|
| Misaki (8x8 pixels): https://littlelimit.net/misaki.htm
|
| k6x8 (6x8 pixels): https://littlelimit.net/k6x8.htm
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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...
| urthor wrote:
| Ootl, why does the character set have "whisky" in the middle
| haha.
| PinguTS wrote:
| Nope, that are just some samples that show the usage of the
| fonts.
| jolmg wrote:
| Wow. I've been using 5px wide Fixed[1] for years because I'd
| never seen another font that is as readable that small, but this
| seems pretty nice.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface)
| sp332 wrote:
| There's a font called Flea's Knees that's sort-of 3 pixels
| wide. The pixels are different colors and it relies on LCD
| subpixel spacing to create the light-and-dark patterns.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190705030013/http://www.typoph...
| fouc wrote:
| Do you use 5px as your primary terminal/editor font size? What
| sort of screen/resolution do you use?
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
|
| This image, for example, is the "5x8 Spleen" font. If you zoom
| in, though, you can see it's really a 4px wide font:
| https://camo.githubusercontent.com/b2fa71fde615bd5510b5e9cb9...
| rasz wrote:
| https://www.pagetable.com/?p=901 Commodore C64 hacked 80x25 mode
| using 4x8 font.
| chronotis wrote:
| I remember much, much fun with graph paper drawing out custom 8x8
| fonts on my C64 way back when.
| phaseshifter wrote:
| Nice, big fan of this style. I normally have Artwiz fonts
| installed on my machine to scratch the tiny bitmap font itch but
| might try this out now.
| Camillo wrote:
| 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. :/
| Semiapies wrote:
| A font for people with excellent vision who want very much to fix
| that.
| mrweasel wrote:
| If people like fonts like that, it's great that it's available,
| but it's not for me any more.
|
| My vision isn't even bad and I don't require glasses, but I
| have turned 40 and I want retina monitors and a 18pt font.
| eric4smith wrote:
| Haha All I can think about is how I need to whip out my strong
| spectacles.
|
| Thank goodness the era of using tiny fonts in UI design is mostly
| over and people have realized that us visually impaired folk
| still need to work.
|
| Still, a nice project
| mncharity wrote:
| > my strong spectacles
|
| 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).
| zackkatz wrote:
| I loved designing every single website using Mini 7 back in the
| day. Amazing that this is just 4px!
| fortran77 wrote:
| There used to be 4-pixel wide fonts (actually 3-pixels plus
| 1-pixel space) to get 70 columns of text on a 280x192 Apple ][.
|
| See the software "Supertext 40/56/70"
|
| https://books.google.com/books?id=ATAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA46&lpg=P...
| saladuh wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://github.com/slavfox/Cozette
| crispyalmond wrote:
| So glad to see this receiving updates again. Love this font.
| app4soft wrote:
| The only problem with Cozette is that it is 5px wide pixel
| font.
|
| So, here is comparison of minimal LCD width required to print
| "Hacker News" (without quotations marks):
|
| - in Cozette: _65px_
|
| - in Creep: _54px_
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaltech:_Earthsiege
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| What software is available for designing pixel fonts with? It's
| something I've always wanted to try.
| panic wrote:
| This one has a web UI and exports JSON:
| http://www.pentacom.jp/pentacom/bitfontmaker2/
| john-doe wrote:
| Fontstruct is great > https://fontstruct.com/
| OpieCunningham wrote:
| Bits 'n Picas is pretty good.
|
| https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas
| milon wrote:
| I've used both gbdfed[1] and Fontforge[2] to edit
| fonts[3][4]...
|
| [1]: https://github.com/andrewshadura/gbdfed
|
| [2]: https://fontforge.org/
|
| [3]: https://github.com/kori/lavender-font
|
| [4]: https://github.com/kori/metis-font
| parisianka wrote:
| Nice work
| daneel_w wrote:
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| Amiga did 80x25 using 640x200 resolution.
| daneel_w wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Nice!
|
| 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
| kortex wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| $ and & using the normally-blank column doesn't render the
| font "useless". If you want that column to always be blank,
| then just trim it.
| chmod775 wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Given the M and W I don't think "mathematically possible"
| is the criteria here.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Here's some options that fit in 4 pixels:
| https://i.imgur.com/LtQ6eb7.png
|
| 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.
| femto wrote:
| or: # ### # ###
| # ### #
| Sharlin wrote:
| This. It's what the C64 (and I guess many/most early home
| computers) did. No need to draw the whole vertical line
| if it doesn't reasonably fit.
| Sharlin wrote:
| ...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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > It's just not mathematically possible to draw a proper
| "$" 4 pixels wide
|
| > Here's some options that fit in 4 pixels
|
| So which is it?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I assume that "proper $" means the middle line is fully
| drawn, forming the two closed spaces at the upper left
| and lower right.
| montroser wrote:
| Nice. Third from the left on top is great -- pretty
| unambiguous, and consistent with the w's and m's.
| airstrike wrote:
| Top right is the winner for me
| xingyzt wrote:
| Can be pulled off with enough context
| https://i.imgur.com/pXA69Xw.png
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I recently posted this in the hoard-of-bitmaps thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27781606
|
| It should include the 3x5 pixel font from Mike Koss's "The
| Terminal" on the Apple ][.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142258
|
| >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.)
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120206091422/http://mckoss.com...
|
| >Tiny (3x5) Font
|
| >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.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I didn't realize people were using fonts to do things like
| visualize data. Is that common? Are there other fonts that are
| suitable for this?
| lytedev wrote:
| 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...
| qart wrote:
| https://github.com/Evizero/UnicodePlots.jl this seems pretty
| popular in Julia, inspired by Drawille mentioned in the
| article.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Looks really nice, pity it doesn't seem to feature accented
| letters yet
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(page generated 2021-07-10 23:01 UTC)