A rendering of a 9-pin “Near Letter Quality” dot matrix font. Derived from the character ROM of an Amstrad DMP3160 printer.
![image of text: Hey, do you like dot matrix printers? You do? Well, I have quite the treat for you: NearlyQ, the “Near Letter Quality” 9pin printer simulating font! Derived directly from the character ROM from an Amstrad DMP3160 printer, it has *all* of the characters: [character table removed] There’s also NearlyQMono for the fixed-width text in your life. Both fonts come with »»»BOLD««« variants, too! Much ? to the CPCWiki contributors for the ROM dumps (C) 2026, Stewart Russell – scruss.com - OFL](https://scruss.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/NearlyQ_sample.png)
I started work on this in 2017, revisited it in late 2018, forgot about it for a few years and then finally completed it in a couple of days in July 2026. My focus is second-to-none!
(github mirror: scruss/NearlyQ: A rendering of a 9-pin “Near Letter Quality” dot matrix font. Derived from the character ROM of an Amstrad DMP3160 printer.)
Coverage
ASCII, plus many European characters. Please see the sample above.
Proportional and mono-spaced versions are provided, each with a bold variant.
- The DMP3160 ROM includes italics, but the coverage is not quite the same and they don’t look great. So I didn’t convert them.
- I clearly added some extra characters to the bitmaps at some point, as the DMP3160 pre-dates the € sign, and yet, there it is!
- The character spacings may not be the same as you’d get on a DMP3160. While the ROM does contain proportional character widths, they seem very wide. Values based on the actual widths of the bitmaps were used.
- 9-pin printers in text mode couldn’t kern, so neither does this.
- The bold (technically, double-strike) mode used here would be impossible for a DMP3160 to reproduce. You should care less about this than I do. (I don’t, at all.)
Design Size
Nominally 12 point / 6 lines per inch.
Source
While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script per variant, the code is too ugly for you to look at. The included NearlyQ.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 NearlyQ and NearlyQMono
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 isn’t an endorsement of SIL.]
Acknowledgements / References
Huge thanks to CPCWiki contributors who provided ROM dumps and notes on where to find character tables in the ROMs.
- Amstrad/Schneider Printer Character Sets — CPCWiki, Internet Archive copy. The site is currently under extreme mechanized scraper traffic and is almost impossible to access.
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