[HN Gopher] Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again
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Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again
Author : speckx
Score : 77 points
Date : 2026-04-09 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (korigamik.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (korigamik.dev)
| addycb wrote:
| Ai writing
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Attacking the source of the message instead of the merits.
|
| Ad-HomineLLM
| nimih wrote:
| AI writing is worse on the merits: it is lower quality and
| has concerning externalities associated with its production.
| lukeasch21 wrote:
| It's also reasonably effective proxy to determine whether
| somebody is actually passionate about the topic they're
| writing about. If you've got a very strong interest in a
| specific niche you're typically able to pour pages and
| pages of ink down talking about it. If you can't be
| bothered to take the necessary time to distill your
| thoughts, it signals to me that your thoughts on the topic
| aren't as worthwhile as someone who's deeply invested in
| it.
|
| Of course this proxy isn't perfect, I understand many
| people use AI to make their writing more comprehensible
| when English isn't their first language.
| captainbland wrote:
| The attention economics are bad more than anything else. LLM
| articles ask us to put more time into reading it than the LLM
| put into writing it. Actually committing time to production
| is the minimum bar which suggests something is worth our time
| in a world where so much is already vying for our attention.
| ryandrake wrote:
| We need an update to the HN posting guidelines that addresses
| this. We already have: Please don't
| complain about tangential annoyances--e.g. article or website
| formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're
| too common to be interesting.
|
| I'm not welcome to complain that the website is a tiny
| vertical strip down my screen with 6 inches of whitespace on
| each side, so we should also not welcome the boring, common
| "The article is written by AI" criticism, which is going to
| apply to 99% of articles by the end of 2026. It's already too
| common to be interesting criticism.
| rpearl wrote:
| an article written by an AI about fonts, when the AI
| fundamentally does not look at rendered text, is inherently
| without merit
| unleaded wrote:
| Who would want to read about the thoughts of an AI?
|
| All it knows about your thoughts are from what text you
| already fed it with, and it will end up adding things you
| don't intend or agree with. Even just telling it to fix
| grammar it can subtly do this.
| wastewastewaste wrote:
| It reads like a dog wrote it. Whether the writer is terrible
| or LLM being terrible, get this shit out of here
| birdsongs wrote:
| Yeah, I got 2 minutes in before a "x isn't just y, _it 's Z_"
|
| It just feels disingenuous. Put a disclaimer at the top, so at
| least I know. But there's not, it's the author's name.
|
| I can prompt chatgpt to write me this. I want to hear from
| people who know the tech/history.
| lukeasch21 wrote:
| It's so bad that whenever I click on blog post I don't start by
| reading the content, first I skim to see if it's even worth my
| time. This one is not.
|
| > The part I keep coming back to
|
| Immediately caught my eye. Reading in...
|
| > Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again. Not
| abstract "digital products". Not generic interfaces. Not
| frictionless panels pretending to be neutral. Actual computers.
|
| Aaand there it is. Tab closed.
| phainopepla2 wrote:
| It's gotten to the point where I barely even skim first. I
| sort of unfocus my eyes and can sometimes see the shape of
| LLM writing. Sort of like when I'm birding and I switch from
| eagle vision to owl vision, and I can ID a bird just by
| catching the way the light reflects off its wingflash in the
| corner of my vision.
| efilife wrote:
| Someone here a couple of months ago made a tool[0] to detect AI
| writing on websites. This one gets categorized as "pure slop"
| https://tropes.fyi/vetter/d7cebcde
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291513
| kstrauser wrote:
| Too bad that tool sucks. I ran my own blog through it and it
| gave me a middling score, even though I've never touched it
| with an AI tool of any kind, even Grammarly.
| tester457 wrote:
| I rather see the prompt they used to make that article, than
| the article itself. It overstayed it's welcome to say
| nothing.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| From that website: "Every bullet point or list item starts
| with a bolded phrase or sentence. Extremely common in Claude
| and ChatGPT markdown output. Almost nobody formats lists this
| way when writing by hand. It's a telltale sign of AI-
| generated documentation and blog posts AND README files
| (especially with emojis)."
|
| That's bullshit. It's very common.
| jameshart wrote:
| I used to do it. Have stopped because AI made it seem
| uncouth.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Bitmap fonts are the ones that look perfect at their intended
| resolution._
|
| This seems to be the center of the author's argument.
|
| But I prefer legibility, readability, being easy on the eye. I
| also prefer antialiasing for its smoothness.
|
| Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I greatly
| appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in books. No
| distracting jaggies.
|
| I don't _want_ my computer to feel like some nostalgic 1980 's
| computer. I just want to get my work done, which involves a lot
| of reading and writing, both code and non-code, which is just
| _more legible_ with vector fonts on a retina screen.
|
| At the end of the day, jaggies are a visual distraction. They're
| cool if you _want_ a retro vibe that distracts and calls
| attention to itself for aesthetic purposes. But not for general
| computer usage.
| mrob wrote:
| >jaggies are a visual distraction
|
| So are serifs, and people don't complain about those. Whether
| any "visual distraction" actually distracts you is a matter of
| what you're accustomed to. If you read enough cursive or
| blackletter it will start to look normal to you. I disable
| anti-aliasing because I'm accustomed to aliasing and it doesn't
| distract me at all. In exchange, I get sharp text on an 1080p
| monitor, effectively quadrupling my graphics performance
| because I no longer need 4K. I'd prefer bitmap fonts, but in
| practice I find full automatic hinting of vector fonts good
| enough.
|
| The only cases where I can see anti-aliasing helping are with
| Chinese and Japanese fonts, which have characters with
| unusually fine details. But on any GUI using Fontconfig you can
| enable anti-aliasing for those fonts specifically and leave it
| disabled for the rest.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Serifs are chosen intentionally to be harmonious with the
| overall letterforms. They provide a feeling of visual
| stability and additional cues for recognizing letterforms.
| They provide a kind of consistency. They're not a
| distraction.
|
| Jaggies come from a limitation of the pixel grid. They
| arbitrarily make diagonal strokes and curves bumpy while
| horizontal and vertical strokes are perfectly smooth, an
| inconsistency that would otherwise have no rhyme or reason
| behind it. Before letterforms were constrained to square
| grids, nobody was making diagonals and curves bumpy because
| it was a desirable aesthetic effect.
|
| Jaggies are a distraction from the underlying letterform we
| all recognize. We know they are an undesirable distortion.
| Serifs are not. They serve an intentional aesthetic purpose,
| proportioned in a carefully balanced way.
| mrob wrote:
| Serifs are a skeuomorphic artifact of stone-carved text.
| They're no more legible than sans-serif fonts (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492894 ). The only
| reason people like them is because they're used to them.
| You can get the same feeling from bitmap fonts if you read
| them enough.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I very intentionally _didn 't_ say serifs were more
| _legible_ than sans-serif.
|
| There _are_ reasons people like them more than just that
| "they're used to them", however. I named a couple of
| them. Just because they _originated_ in stone doesn 't
| mean we _kept using them_ for the same reason. A lot of
| things originate for one reason and then become used for
| other reasons.
|
| Believe me, I got "used to" bitmap fonts throughout the
| 80's and 90's. But I still always preferred the 300dpi
| version of a document from my LaserWriter and then
| inkjet. Getting used to bitmap fonts _never_ meant
| preferring them for general computer usage. Jaggies that
| appear arbitrarily on some strokes but not others is not
| visually pleasing. Nostalgic, maybe, but virtually never
| anything you 'd choose if you weren't intentionally
| trying to create a retro vibe.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| > Every screen I have has been Retina for a long time. I
| greatly appreciate that text is now as legible as it is in
| books. No distracting jaggies.
|
| Not all of us are in that position, and modern font rendering
| has gotten really bad on non-high DPI monitors, so using a
| bitmap font has been a way to get rid of the blur and get back
| to sharp crisp text.
|
| For me, I'd rather have jagged text than a blurry _literally_
| headache inducing mess.
|
| That said, the issue here isn't that one is better than the
| other, but that for some people one or the other is easier to
| read, and the _right_ answer is that all of this need to be
| configurable. Just like light and dark mode.
| crazygringo wrote:
| OP is taking screenshots of low-res bitmap fonts on a high-
| res Mac screen (note the perfectly smooth window controls).
|
| They're making an argument for bitmap fonts _even on modern
| Retina displays_ as far as I can tell, since they 're talking
| about making modern computers feel like older computers.
|
| I'm pushing against that.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| I loved the look of the fonts on DOS after I upgraded from a C64.
| My favorite was the exclamation mark on 1024x768 (VGA). It had
| curves! Pointy at the bottom right above the dot, and the rounded
| curve at the top. I've never found a monospace non-bitmapped font
| that had the same character. (ha!)
| 6thbit wrote:
| I'm good with my Iosevka ExtraLight with iTerm2's thin strokes
| enabled.
|
| But the bitmaps do make me nostalgic, maybe useful to read my own
| old code and cringe a little less.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I often question myself on why the aesthetics of personal
| computing were so special our brains that it sticks to this day.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Perhaps because we grew up with it. The VGA 8x16 font reminds
| me of growing up when I had my first computer that was all
| mine, with a plasma display where the pixels were clearly
| visible, yet quite restful on the eyes.
| agumonkey wrote:
| the nostalgia doesn't check all the boxes, even though yeah
| it's hard to deny, but it embodies a different mindset, a
| strange limited visual form that promised the future. it was
| also its own kind of design and aesthetic, today we have
| infinitely capable machines and all possible fonts but we
| lost that difference.
|
| ps: i have the same relationship to vintage desktop computer
| form factor, something about an old blocky box, an hdd led, a
| cd drive
| joezydeco wrote:
| Because there were constraints. Name it: CPU speed, RAM, screen
| size, connection speed, whatever. We long for those days when
| we had to sit back and think the problem out instead of adding
| another package import.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It was an era when you could know a machine. I had a C64 and
| had a huge chunk of its kernal addresses memorized from sheer
| repetition. You could remember its whole ISA and timings. The
| memory map was learnable. The hardware interfaces were simple.
|
| I have zero desire to use a C64 again, aside from the
| occasional nostalgia pang for a specific game or program. But I
| do miss that feeling of complete, total understand of the thing
| in front of me. I think that's the feeling that implanted on
| me, and that the aesthetics conjure. "Hey, the world is
| complicated, but this font looks a lot like the time when you
| felt like you knew everything."
| jibal wrote:
| I started programming on an IBM 1620 with 20,000 BCD digits
| of memory, 20 usec to add 2 digits, 160 usec for branch not
| taken, 200 usec for branch taken. I remember these and many
| other details but I have no desire to go back because I'm not
| an idiot. The first computer I owned was an Amiga 1000, to
| which I added a 50 MB hard drive that cost me $1000. Again,
| no desire to go back. Same with bad fonts.
| CarVac wrote:
| I made a bitmap font for the PhobGCC project for use in its video
| output but I don't know how to make it into a bitmap font for use
| on computers.
| kps wrote:
| This is like the (fortunately brief) fad of 'shabby chic' -- it's
| a signal that you've never had to suffer the real thing.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| Couldn't disagree more, I get headaches from blurry text, so I
| daily drive Terminus TTF, and have done so for years. Modern
| font rendering really has becole quite terrible unless you own
| a high DPI screen, even when using full hinting.
|
| And no, subpixel anti-aliasing doesn't help, the colour
| bleeding is even worse.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Buy a modern monitor or just run your display at a low res
| and disable antialiasing? Phones are now 500 PPI+, theres no
| real excuse for using a low DPI screen.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| Income and effective cost of things like desktop monitors
| vary wildly across the world, that argument doesn't really
| fly.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I vehemently disagree. Recently bought a pretty good and
| affordable 21:9 Chinese monitor, and I couldn't be
| happier with it. A good monitor is a basic QOL
| improvement for IT professionals, and these days they're
| still cheap because they aren't affected by the recent
| HDD, GPU, or RAM scarcity.
|
| For reference, I live in Mexico, and bought the monitor
| with less than two week's worth of groceries. Recognized
| brands would cost four or five times more, but there are
| options for every budget.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| I use Terminus TTF for my terminal and text editor. I fully agree
| with their description of it as a workhorse font. The Gohu font
| they mention also seem interesting.
|
| In general bitmap fonts avoid the blurryness of modern font
| rendering made for high DPI monitors, which fails spectacularly
| on low DPI monitors (which is what I still have). And blurry text
| give me _literal_ headaches. And this is why I gave up on
| anything but bitmap fonts in recent years.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| Well-hinted fonts such as Consolas are indeed very rare.
|
| I think I've only found Liberation and Hack to appear decent on
| standard density display. Roboto Mono is nicely shaped but
| blurry. I think Noto Mono used to have hints but dropped them.
| It was hours spent trying out different fonts only to
| ultimately go back to msttcore-fonts for me.
| cmdrk wrote:
| 100% the same problem here.
|
| I have to show people extremely zoomed-in screenshots of how
| $VENDOR default monospaced fonts get rendered compared to
| Terminus at the correct size in order for them to understand my
| pain. The hinting is just blurry bleh.
|
| These days, because I am also old, I want a comparatively large
| pixel-perfect font. I've yet to find a good one but haven't
| looked much beyond Terminus honestly. Maybe I can render it an
| acceptable integer multiple without it being too large?
| amlib wrote:
| I've been using it for a long time and I can't use a new
| computer or a work computer without it for long before I feel
| like my eyes are going bad. I specially like the bold version,
| seems to do well with my astigmatism, specially in reverse
| video/"dark mode".
|
| I never knew there was a TTF variant, might be a good fit on
| software that stubbornly blurs it when rendering in hi-dpi.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Same. Pixel-perfect Terminus for the win in my terminals and in
| my beloved Emacs.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Subpixel antialiasing works really well on low DPI monitors,
| though. When Microsoft implemented it, it felt like magic
| compared to bitmapped or regular font aliasing.
| 0907 wrote:
| I've dabbled a few times in writing bitmap font parsers for both
| technically constrained and artistic projects. There is a reason
| that design has resolved to the same few cliches, because
| expectability, latent understanding, and 'obviousness' reduces
| onboarding curve and fatigue. It's a cognitive accessibility
| issue before you even get to legitimate accessibility concerns.
| Render a .F16 at anything larger than 16px in a modern
| application and you're introducing issues which are solved,
| quantitatively and qualitatively, by vector graphics and
| antialiasing. There's an optimistic naivety which is nice to
| have, but misunderstands design as a conduit for informed action
| vs design as an aesthetic function independent of intent is
| legitimately dangerous if you're doing anything other than
| building narrative products emulating older tech.
| nice_byte wrote:
| ai slop
| KronisLV wrote:
| Can confirm that Terminus is pretty nice, used it as my main
| programming font for a little bit, before moving over to Iosevka!
| gorgoiler wrote:
| What I love most about Iosevka -- and there are surely many
| things more than just one thing to love -- is that it is not
| merely defined as a typeface using a fount encoding, but it is
| defined in a _programming language_. Of course it shows up in
| its router-sign aesthetics, but knowing how it is all defined
| is a huge part of its charm. A kind of Esperanto of faces.
| susam wrote:
| A few years ago, when I wrote my own Invaders-like game [1], I
| was quite unhappy with the rendering quality of the HTML Canvas
| fillText() method. The antialiasing introduced multiple shades of
| green, whereas I wanted to render the text in a solid monochrome
| green while the glyphs retained their crisp, jagged edges.
| Although `canvas { image-rendering: pixelated }` improved the
| crispness and jaggedness, it could not entirely eliminate the
| multiple shades of green.
|
| I finally decided to take the matter into my own hands. I looked
| for IBM PC OEM fonts [2] and similar ones [3], stored the bitmaps
| as integer arrays within my code [2], and used them to render
| each character cell by cell. I am very happy with the results.
|
| It was a childhood dream of mine to write a game like this, but I
| did not have sufficient access to computers as a child. So I
| could fulfil this dream only as an adult, a few years ago. The
| implementation is very simple, and everything on the canvas,
| including the text, is drawn using fillRect().
|
| By the way, if you happen to do something similar, I have made
| all the bitmaps available as integer arrays in a separate,
| standalone project [5].
|
| [1] https://susam.net/invaders.html
|
| [2] https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
|
| [3] https://www.dafont.com/modern-dos.font
|
| [4]
| https://codeberg.org/susam/invaders/src/branch/main/invaders...
|
| [5] https://codeberg.org/susam/pcface#readme
| jamiejquinn wrote:
| Absolutely sublime attention to detail. Reminds me of the
| series on fonts in Josh Ge's blog on Cogmind
| (https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2014/09/cogmind-fonts/)
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Why is Greybeard listed as "License: Custom, double-check before
| reuse" when the LICENSE file in the repo is MIT?
| RogerL wrote:
| It's an AI generated article; don't trust anything in it unless
| you verify it.
| cladopa wrote:
| I have a different opinion. I had access to real terminals when I
| was young and they had amazingly sharp fonts. They had hardwired
| optically etched fonts and were incredible. 100% smooth.
|
| I had to work with DOS screens that were sketched to different
| aspect ratios and blurred and it was so painful, specially after
| having seen proper fonts on the screen.
|
| One of the reasons for starting to use Linux was using high
| quality fonts with the terminal.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > One of the reasons for starting to use Linux was using high
| quality fonts with the terminal.
|
| Yes! Speaking of Linux, I'm personally very font of Terminus.
|
| I like it so much my main coding font is a modified, pixel-
| perfect (no AA at all) version of Terminus since forever (I
| modified a few letters like the 'l' and the 's' and took a few
| glyphs from a pixel-perfect Monaco font [like %, &, @ and
| modified those a bit too). I did it so many years ago I don't
| remember the process (but I've got notes about it, so I could
| redo it).
|
| I'm on a (non-retina / non 4K) 38" ultra-wide display that does
| 3840x1600 natively (and it's the resolution I use). I love it
| for I can have three 1280x1600 "columns" side by side (but I'm
| using a tiling WM so I've got many preset layouts anyway).
| YMMV.
| jibal wrote:
| Glad I have a good font in my browser to read such nonsense.
| tommica wrote:
| Well written article, a great eye opener. I did not at all
| consider the bitmap fonts in context of aesthetics, which is such
| an oversight.
|
| The fonts presented do look amazing, so absolutely will ck figure
| my terminal with one of them.
| Animats wrote:
| Sometimes I think all the HN "get off my lawn" postings need to
| be moved to another site.
| enriquto wrote:
| Conspicuously missing to this list is uwe's ttyp0 [0].
|
| One of the few bitmap fonts (with terminus) having somewhat
| complete unicode support and going to very large pixel sizes, so
| that they are visible on modern screens with tiny pixels.
|
| [0] https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~uwe/misc/uw-ttyp0/
| sssilver wrote:
| > Not because they are retro.
|
| > Because they still work.
|
| I find this writing style so viscerally infuriating.
| Lammy wrote:
| I am eternally annoyed at GNOME Project for, among many many
| other reasons, forcing the removal of bitmap font support as of
| Pango 1.44 due to forcing Harfbuzz as the only supported shaping
| library:
|
| - https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-dire...
|
| - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/386
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Yet the article is not using a bitmap font
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