Futile Fonts

I make fonts sometimes. All of them have very permissive licensing.

  • mnicmp — you all wanted the DECwriter dot matrix font, but with the option of making the dots tiny stars or ♥s? Of course you did …
    Fontlibrary link: mnicmp
    See also: LoveMatrix, a lo-fi dot matrix font made of ♥♥♥s. Fontlibrary: LoveMatrix.
  • Keypunch029 — a fairly accurate rendition of the 5×7 dot matrix font printed at the top of punched cards by the IBM Type 29 Card Punch (1965).

    Fontlibrary: Keypunch029
  • ThreeFourTwoTwo — In the early 1980s, just before dot-matrix displays became a thing, companies produced more and more complex alphanumeric displays based on LED segments. One of the last of these was Litronix’s DL-3422, a huge DIP device holding four twenty two segment characters. These are now rare and alarmingly expensive, so I made a font based on the matrix in the datasheet.
    sample
    Fontlibrary: ThreeFourTwoTwo
    (See also: TwentyfourSixteen, a simpler font that uses 17 segments.)
  • FifteenTwenty — A mono-spaced font family derived from character stroke coordinates from the Commodore 1520 plotter ROM. This has been documented here – http://e4aws.silverdr.com/hacks/6500_1/ – and here – https://github.com/Project-64/reloaded/tree/master/1520/rom. The original font encoding is extremely compact, packing a move/plot/end instruction with coordinates in 8 bits. (github archive: scruss/FifteenTwenty)
    FifteenTwenty-demo
    Fontlibrary: FifteenTwenty
  • AVHershey-OTF — a work-in-progress to convert the old Hershey fonts to usable OpenType fonts with as many of the symbols mapped to Unicode as possible. I’ve been working on this on and off for the last five years. It’s still likely not fit for use.
    pr-AVHersheyComplexMedium

If you really must, there’s my fairly ancient and relatively terrible code for creating a TrueType font from your handwriting with your scanner, your printer, and FontForge. There’s also my Font Library page.