New font: A73

Based on E73 from a couple of days ago, this is extended for full ASCII coverage:

Design Size

The 12 point design size is meant to reproduce 10 characters per inch horizontally, and six lines per inch vertically.

Variants

The ECMA 42 standard states (§ 4.2):

The dots … are circles of 0.4 mm diameter nominal or polygons of equivalent area.

So I went slightly overboard on the dot shapes:

   A73      Circles
   A73D     Diamonds
   A73L     Lozenges
   A73P     Pentagons
   A73S     Squares
   A73T     Triangles
   A73St    Stars
   A73H     Hearts(!)

Source

While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script, the code is too ugly to include here. The included a73.json is likely more useful: it contains all of the pin definitions keyed by character name.

Licence

© 2026 – Stewart Russell, scruss.com with Reserved Font Names A73, A73D, A73L, A73P, A73S, A73T, A73St and A73H.

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence, Version 1.1.
https://openfontlicense.org/

[I do not agree with SIL’s missionary work in any way, and the use of this licence is in no way an endorsement of SIL.]

Reference

• ECMA-42: Alpha-numeric character set for 7×9 matrix printers; 1st edition, December 1973 (withdrawn): “This Standard defines the printed image and the nominal dimensions of a font for 7×9 matrix printers. The characters have been designed for both human and machine readability.”
• E73