We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: font

  • New font: nic7pin

    A rendering of a 7-pin dot matrix font, as used by the Epson MX-70 reduced-cost printer from the mid-1980s.

    Fixed width dot matrix font sample
    note the complete lack of descenders
    nic7pin-font.zipDownload

    (github mirror: scruss/nic7pin: a 7-pin dot matrix font, as used by the Epson MX-70)

    Name

    Seiko Epson Corporation is named as “son of EP-101”, for the world’s first compact, lightweight digital printer. I’m Scottish, and in Scots Gaelic “son of” is mac. Unfortunately, that prefix has been co-opted by an overpriced computer vendor. In Gaelic, nic means “daughter of”, so as an oblique compliment to Epson, this font is named daughter of 7 pin. It seemed like a good idea at the time …

    Coverage

    ASCII.

    Design Size

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

    Source

    While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script, the code is too ugly for you to look at. The included mx70.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 Name nic7pin

    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.]

    References

  • New font: A73

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

    Fixed width dot matrix font sample
    A73-RegularDownload

    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(!)
    font sample of a dot-matrix font where each character is made up of dots that are circles, diamonds, lozenges, pentagons, squares, triangles, stars or 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

  • New font: E73

    Hey! If you want a variant with full ASCII coverage, go here: A73.

    A rendering of the ECMA-42 standard bitmap printer font from 1973.

    Fixed width dot matrix font sample
    No descenders, and no two adjacent dots are filled, like all old 7-pin printers
    E73-Regular.zipDownload

    Also on github: scruss/E73: ECMA-42 standard printer font from 1973.

    Name

    E from ECMA, and 1973 for its publication year.

    Coverage

    ASCII, mostly. The standard did not provide definitions for these characters:

    • U+005F _ LOW LINE
    • U+0060 ` GRAVE ACCENT
    • U+007B { LEFT CURLY BRACKET
    • U+007D } RIGHT CURLY BRACKET
    • U+007E ~ TILDE

    As this is an attempt to faithfully implement a standard, these characters were not synthesized. In a slight concession to modernity, glyphs for A–Z have been copied to a–z.

    The standard also defines the following extended characters:

    • U+00A4 ¤ CURRENCY SIGN
    • U+00A3 £ POUND SIGN
    • U+00C6 Æ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE
    • U+00C5 Å LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE
    • U+00C4 Ä LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS
    • U+00A7 § SECTION SIGN
    • U+0132 IJ LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE IJ
    • U+00D6 Ö LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS
    • U+00D8 Ø LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE
    • U+00DC Ü LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS

    Design Size

    The 12 point design size is meant to reproduce 10 characters per inch horizontally, and six lines per inch vertically. This is a requirement of the standard to match OCR fonts of the day.

    Variants

    None. This is an attempt to reproduce the character forms exactly according to the standard document.

    Source

    While this font is produced entirely by one Python FontForge script, the code is too ugly to include here. The included ecma42.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 Name E73

    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

  • “… that Chinese instruction manual font”

    (this is an old post from 2021 that got caught in my drafts somehow)

    Mike asked:

    To which I suggested:

    English text in MOESongUN monospaced serif font" "You mean this one? This is MOESongUN from Taiwan"

    Not very helpful links, more of a thought-dump:

    First PostScript font: STSong (华文宋体) was released in 1991, making it the first PostScript font by a Chinese foundry [ref: Typekit blog — Pan-CJK Partner Profile: SinoType]. But STSong looks like Garamond(ish).

    A table of the latin characters @, A-Z, [, \, ], ^, _, `, a-z and { in STSong half-width latin, taken from fontforge

    Maybe source: GB 5007.1-85 24×24 Bitmap Font Set of Chinese Characters for Information Exchange. Originally from 1985, this is a more recent version: GB 5007.1-2010: Information technology—Chinese ideogram coded character set (basic set)—24 dot matrix font.

    half-width Latin text table from Chinese standard GB 5007.1-85

  • For completeness: Level 9 “Snowball” bitmap font

    screenshot from an emulated Amstrad CPC464 with yellow text on a blue background. The font is some horrific "futuristic" thing that looks like the numbers on the bottom of paper cheques, for some reason. The first lines of text say *** It's the Level 9 font *** *** from Snowball! *** Dug up by scruss, 2020-01 In blue text, there are a few lines of generic "lorem ipsum" filler text. The last line says "arfle barfle gloop?", which was the Level9 parser's error message. Three characters of the Level9 logo follow: a capital L and digit 9 kerned into the same character cell Under this, in yellow again, an ASCII chart of the characters from space (32) to DEL (127)
    The Snowball font on the Amstrad CPC 464

    Oooh blecch — did I really like this when I was a young ‘un? Following on from the same process as in The coolest font (when I was 15, that is) here’s the bitmap font from Level 9’s Snowball.

     10 REM    *** L9SFONT.BAS ***
 15 REM bitmap font from Level 9's
 20 REM Snowball text adventure
 30 REM  on the Amstrad CPC 464
 40 REM (it was so cool at the time ...)
 50 REM Dug up by scruss, 2020-01
 60 REM ==============================
 100 SYMBOL AFTER 32
 110 MODE 1
 120 GOSUB 1000
 130 PRINT" *** It's the Level 9 font ***"
 140 PRINT" ***    from  Snowball!    ***"
 150 PRINT"   Dug up by scruss, 2020-01"
 160 PRINT
 170 PEN 2
 180 PRINT"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur"
 190 PRINT"adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor"
 200 PRINT"incididunt ut labore et dolore magna"
 210 PRINT"aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis"
 220 PRINT"nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris"
 230 PRINT"nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat"
 240 PRINT"arfle barfle gloop? | | |"
 250 PRINT
 260 PEN 1
 270 FOR i%=32 TO 127
 280 PRINT CHR$(i%); " ";
 290 NEXT i%
 300 PRINT
 310 PRINT
 990 END
 1000 SYMBOL 33,&10,&28,&28,&28,&10,0,&38,0
 1010 SYMBOL 34,&66,&66,&44,&88,0,0,0,0
 1020 SYMBOL 35,0,&24,&7e,&24,&24,&7e,&24,0
 1030 SYMBOL 36,&10,&7c,&40,&7c,&04,&7c,&10,0
 1040 SYMBOL 37,&e4,&a4,&e8,&10,&2e,&4a,&4e,0
 1050 SYMBOL 38,&70,&88,&88,&72,&84,&88,&76,0
 1060 SYMBOL 39,&0c,&0c,&08,&10,0,0,0,0
 1070 SYMBOL 40,&0c,&10,&30,&30,&20,&14,&0c,0
 1080 SYMBOL 41,&30,&28,&04,&0c,&0c,&08,&30,0
 1090 SYMBOL 42,&10,&54,&38,&fe,&38,&54,&10,0
 1100 SYMBOL 43,0,&10,&10,&7c,&10,&10,0,0
 1110 SYMBOL 44,0,0,0,0,&18,&18,&10,&20
 1120 SYMBOL 45,0,0,0,&fc,0,0,0,0
 1130 SYMBOL 46,0,0,0,0,&1c,&14,&1c,0
 1140 SYMBOL 47,0,&06,&0e,&08,&10,&70,&60,0
 1150 SYMBOL 48,&fc,&8c,&8c,&84,&c4,&c4,&fc,0
 1160 SYMBOL 49,&30,&10,&10,&10,&18,&18,&38,0
 1170 SYMBOL 50,&f8,&98,&08,&f8,&80,&c8,&f8,0
 1180 SYMBOL 51,&7c,&64,&04,&3c,&34,&04,&7c,0
 1190 SYMBOL 52,&c8,&88,&88,&f8,&08,&18,&18,0
 1200 SYMBOL 53,&f8,&98,&80,&f0,&08,&c8,&f0,0
 1210 SYMBOL 54,&78,&98,&80,&f8,&98,&c8,&f8,0
 1220 SYMBOL 55,&fc,&c4,&04,&08,&08,&18,&18,0
 1230 SYMBOL 56,&fc,&c4,&8c,&fc,&84,&9c,&fc,0
 1240 SYMBOL 57,&fc,&e4,&84,&fc,&04,&0c,&0c,0
 1250 SYMBOL 58,&38,&28,&38,0,&38,&28,&38,0
 1260 SYMBOL 59,&18,&18,0,&18,&18,&10,&20,0
 1270 SYMBOL 60,&04,&08,&10,&20,&10,&08,&04,0
 1280 SYMBOL 61,0,0,&7e,0,&7e,0,0,0
 1290 SYMBOL 62,&80,&40,&20,&10,&20,&40,&80,0
 1300 SYMBOL 63,&7c,&04,&1c,&10,&10,0,&10,0
 1310 SYMBOL 64,&3e,&22,&2e,&2a,&2e,&20,&3e,0
 1320 SYMBOL 65,&fc,&c4,&8c,&fc,&84,&c4,&c4,0
 1330 SYMBOL 66,&f8,&84,&e4,&f8,&84,&9c,&f8,0
 1340 SYMBOL 67,&fc,&8c,&80,&80,&c0,&c4,&fc,0
 1350 SYMBOL 68,&f8,&64,&64,&44,&4c,&4c,&f8,0
 1360 SYMBOL 69,&fc,&8c,&c0,&f8,&c0,&8c,&fc,0
 1370 SYMBOL 70,&fc,&9c,&80,&f8,&80,&c0,&c0,0
 1380 SYMBOL 71,&fc,&9c,&80,&9c,&c4,&c4,&fc,0
 1390 SYMBOL 72,&c4,&c4,&84,&fc,&84,&8c,&8c,0
 1400 SYMBOL 73,&7c,&14,&10,&10,&10,&50,&7c,0
 1410 SYMBOL 74,&7c,&54,&10,&18,&18,&90,&60,0
 1420 SYMBOL 75,&c8,&90,&a0,&d0,&88,&8c,&8c,0
 1430 SYMBOL 76,&c0,&c0,&c0,&80,&80,&98,&f8,0
 1440 SYMBOL 77,&82,&ee,&92,&92,&ba,&82,&c6,0
 1450 SYMBOL 78,&8c,&c4,&c4,&b4,&8c,&8c,&84,0
 1460 SYMBOL 79,&fc,&c4,&c4,&84,&8c,&8c,&fc,0
 1470 SYMBOL 80,&fc,&c4,&8c,&fc,&80,&c0,&c0,0
 1480 SYMBOL 81,&fc,&c4,&c4,&84,&94,&88,&f4,0
 1490 SYMBOL 82,&fc,&c4,&8c,&fc,&90,&c8,&cc,0
 1500 SYMBOL 83,&fc,&84,&80,&78,&04,&84,&fc,0
 1510 SYMBOL 84,&7c,&10,&10,&10,&30,&30,&30,0
 1520 SYMBOL 85,&c4,&c4,&84,&8c,&8c,&8c,&fc,0
 1530 SYMBOL 86,&c4,&84,&84,&48,&48,&30,&30,0
 1540 SYMBOL 87,&84,&84,&84,&b4,&b4,&cc,&84,0
 1550 SYMBOL 88,&cc,&cc,&48,&30,&48,&cc,&cc,0
 1560 SYMBOL 89,&86,&86,&44,&28,&10,&18,&18,0
 1570 SYMBOL 90,&fc,&84,&08,&30,&40,&84,&fc,0
 1580 SYMBOL 91,&7c,&60,&60,&40,&40,&4c,&7c,0
 1590 SYMBOL 92,0,&60,&30,&10,&08,&0c,&06,0
 1600 SYMBOL 93,&3e,&32,&02,&02,&06,&06,&3e,0
 1610 SYMBOL 94,&18,&24,&42,&42,0,0,0,0
 1620 SYMBOL 95,0,0,0,0,0,0,&ee,&bb
 1630 SYMBOL 96,&3c,&22,&78,&20,&78,&20,&7e,0
 1640 SYMBOL 97,0,0,&f8,&98,&88,&cc,&fc,0
 1650 SYMBOL 98,&80,&80,&f8,&98,&88,&c8,&f8,0
 1660 SYMBOL 99,0,0,&f8,&88,&c0,&c8,&f8,0
 1670 SYMBOL 100,&08,&08,&f8,&98,&88,&c8,&f8,0
 1680 SYMBOL 101,0,0,&f8,&80,&e0,&80,&f8,0
 1690 SYMBOL 102,0,&1c,&10,&38,&38,&10,&70,0
 1700 SYMBOL 103,0,0,&f8,&98,&88,&f8,&08,&78
 1710 SYMBOL 104,&c0,&c0,&80,&f8,&88,&cc,&cc,0
 1720 SYMBOL 105,0,&60,0,&60,&60,&70,&70,0
 1730 SYMBOL 106,&08,0,&18,&18,&08,&08,&68,&78
 1740 SYMBOL 107,&c0,&c0,&cc,&d8,&f0,&d8,&cc,0
 1750 SYMBOL 108,&30,&30,&30,&30,&30,&30,&30,0
 1760 SYMBOL 109,0,0,&cc,&b4,&b4,&84,&84,0
 1770 SYMBOL 110,0,0,&f8,&98,&88,&cc,&cc,0
 1780 SYMBOL 111,0,0,&f8,&98,&88,&c8,&f8,0
 1790 SYMBOL 112,0,0,&f8,&98,&88,&f8,&80,&80
 1800 SYMBOL 113,0,0,&f8,&88,&c8,&f8,&0c,&0c
 1810 SYMBOL 114,0,0,&f8,&98,&80,&c0,&c0,0
 1820 SYMBOL 115,0,0,&f8,&80,&70,&08,&f8,0
 1830 SYMBOL 116,&60,&60,&20,&78,&20,&28,&38,0
 1840 SYMBOL 117,0,0,&c8,&c8,&98,&98,&f8,0
 1850 SYMBOL 118,0,0,&cc,&cc,&88,&70,&20,0
 1860 SYMBOL 119,0,0,&84,&84,&b4,&b4,&cc,0
 1870 SYMBOL 120,0,0,&cc,&48,&30,&48,&cc,0
 1880 SYMBOL 121,0,0,&88,&c8,&f8,&08,&08,&78
 1890 SYMBOL 122,0,0,&f8,&90,&20,&48,&f8,0
 1900 SYMBOL 123,&0c,&30,&10,&60,&10,&30,&0c,0
 1910 SYMBOL 124,&df,&db,&db,&9f,&83,&9b,&fb,0
 1920 SYMBOL 125,&30,&0c,&08,&06,&08,&0c,&30,0
 1930 SYMBOL 126,&7c,&82,&ba,&a2,&ba,&82,&7c,0
 1940 SYMBOL 127,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF
 1950 RETURN

    Process was the same:

    1. Load the disk image into an emulator
    2. Load the game
    3. Save the game as a v2 snapshot – these are uncompressed memory dumps
    4. Dump the snapshot to a png using phooky’s PROM/bin2png.py
    5. Crop that image down to just the character data and save as a plain PBM
    6. For each column, create the hex dump using shell code a bit like this:
    sc=32; pnminvert snowball_font.pbm | pnmnoraw | tail +3 | cut --character="1-8"|while read f; do echo "printf '&%02x, \n' "\"\$((2#${f}))\"; done | bash | fmt -w43 | sed 's/,$//;' | while read g; do echo SYMBOL $sc", "$g; sc=$((sc + 1)); done | awk '{print 10 * (NR + 0) " " $0;}' > schars032to063.bas

    TBH, the 901447-10m third-party font for the PET did the Data 70/Westminster faux-MICR thing better, and likely earlier too.

    screenshot from an emulated Commodore PET with green text on a black background. The font is some horrific "futuristic" thing that looks like the numbers on the bottom of paper cheques, for some reason. The first line of text says *** 901447-10m Char ROM *** Below this, there are a few lines of generic "lorem ipsum" filler text. The last line says "arfle barfle gloop?", which was the Level9 parser's error message. Under this, an ASCII chart of the characters from space (32) to DEL (127)

  • The coolest font (when I was 15, that is)

    vaguely uncial style bitmap font from old 8-bit Level 9 text adventure
    The Colossal Cave font on the Amstrad CPC 464

    Though I didn’t really have the patience for text adventures, Level 9 used what I thought was the coolest font (circa 1985). After checking through them all on the Internet Archive Amstrad CPC software library, I couldn’t find a version that used this bitmap font. I eventually found it on nvg. After lots of messing about, I extracted it and present it here. I’m sure I’ll make a TTF of it soon enough.

    Tastes change a bit, don’t they?

     10 REM     *** L9FONT.BAS ***
 15 REM bitmap font from Level 9's
 20 REM Colossal Cave adventure
 30 REM  on the Amstrad CPC 464
 40 REM (it was so cool at the time…)
 50 REM Dug up by scruss, 2019-12
 60 REM ==============================
 100 SYMBOL AFTER 32
 110 MODE 1
 120 GOSUB 1000
 130 PRINT" *** It's the Level 9 font ***"
 140 PRINT" ***  from Colossal Cave!  ***"
 150 PRINT"   Dug up by scruss, 2019-12"
 160 PRINT
 170 PEN 2
 180 PRINT"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur"
 190 PRINT"adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor"
 200 PRINT"incididunt ut labore et dolore magna"
 210 PRINT"aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis"
 220 PRINT"nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris"
 230 PRINT"nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat"
 240 PRINT"arfle barfle gloop? | | |"
 250 PRINT
 260 PEN 1
 270 FOR i%=32 TO 127
 280 PRINT CHR$(i%); " ";
 290 NEXT i%
 300 PRINT
 310 PRINT
 990 END
 1000 SYMBOL 33,&18,&24,&24,&24,&18,&0,&18,&0
 1010 SYMBOL 34,&66,&66,&44,&88,&0,&0,&0,&0
 1020 SYMBOL 35,&0,&24,&7E,&24,&24,&7E,&24,&0
 1030 SYMBOL 36,&12,&7C,&D0,&7C,&16,&FC,&10,&0
 1040 SYMBOL 37,&E4,&A4,&E8,&10,&2E,&4A,&4E,&0
 1050 SYMBOL 38,&70,&D8,&D8,&72,&D6,&CC,&76,&0
 1060 SYMBOL 39,&30,&30,&20,&40,&0,&0,&0,&0
 1070 SYMBOL 40,&1C,&38,&70,&70,&70,&38,&1C,&0
 1080 SYMBOL 41,&70,&38,&1C,&1C,&1C,&38,&70,&0
 1090 SYMBOL 42,&10,&54,&38,&FE,&38,&54,&10,&0
 1100 SYMBOL 43,&0,&10,&10,&7C,&10,&10,&0,&0
 1110 SYMBOL 44,&0,&0,&0,&0,&30,&30,&20,&40
 1120 SYMBOL 45,&0,&0,&0,&F8,&0,&0,&0,&0
 1130 SYMBOL 46,&0,&0,&0,&0,&0,&60,&60,&0
 1140 SYMBOL 47,&0,&4,&8,&10,&20,&40,&0,&0
 1150 SYMBOL 48,&7C,&C6,&CE,&D6,&E6,&C6,&7C,&0
 1160 SYMBOL 49,&8,&18,&38,&18,&18,&18,&3C,&0
 1170 SYMBOL 50,&3C,&66,&C,&18,&30,&62,&7E,&0
 1180 SYMBOL 51,&7E,&4C,&18,&3C,&6,&66,&3C,&0
 1190 SYMBOL 52,&4,&C,&1C,&2C,&7E,&C,&1E,&0
 1200 SYMBOL 53,&3E,&66,&60,&7C,&6,&6,&7C,&0
 1210 SYMBOL 54,&3C,&66,&60,&7C,&66,&66,&3C,&0
 1220 SYMBOL 55,&7E,&46,&6,&C,&C,&18,&18,&0
 1230 SYMBOL 56,&3C,&66,&34,&18,&2C,&66,&3C,&0
 1240 SYMBOL 57,&3C,&66,&66,&3E,&6,&66,&3C,&0
 1250 SYMBOL 58,&0,&30,&30,&0,&0,&30,&30,&0
 1260 SYMBOL 59,&0,&30,&30,&0,&30,&30,&20,&40
 1270 SYMBOL 60,&1C,&30,&60,&C0,&60,&30,&1C,&0
 1280 SYMBOL 61,&0,&0,&F8,&0,&F8,&0,&0,&0
 1290 SYMBOL 62,&E0,&30,&18,&C,&18,&30,&E0,&0
 1300 SYMBOL 63,&7C,&64,&C,&18,&10,&0,&10,&0
 1310 SYMBOL 64,&7C,&C6,&DE,&D2,&DE,&C0,&7E,&0
 1320 SYMBOL 65,&18,&6C,&C6,&C6,&FE,&66,&F6,&0
 1330 SYMBOL 66,&FC,&C6,&C6,&FC,&C6,&C6,&FC,&0
 1340 SYMBOL 67,&3C,&66,&C0,&C0,&C0,&66,&3C,&0
 1350 SYMBOL 68,&D8,&EC,&C6,&C6,&C6,&EC,&D8,&0
 1360 SYMBOL 69,&FE,&62,&60,&78,&60,&62,&FE,&0
 1370 SYMBOL 70,&FE,&62,&60,&78,&60,&60,&E0,&0
 1380 SYMBOL 71,&3C,&66,&C0,&CE,&C6,&66,&3C,&0
 1390 SYMBOL 72,&C6,&C6,&C6,&FE,&C6,&C6,&C6,&0
 1400 SYMBOL 73,&7E,&18,&18,&18,&18,&18,&7E,&0
 1410 SYMBOL 74,&FE,&8C,&C,&C,&C,&CC,&78,&0
 1420 SYMBOL 75,&E6,&CC,&D8,&F0,&D8,&CC,&C6,&0
 1430 SYMBOL 76,&E0,&C0,&C0,&C0,&C0,&C2,&FE,&0
 1440 SYMBOL 77,&C6,&EE,&FE,&D6,&C6,&C6,&CC,&0
 1450 SYMBOL 78,&CE,&E6,&F6,&DE,&CE,&C6,&C6,&0
 1460 SYMBOL 79,&38,&6C,&C6,&C6,&C6,&6C,&38,&0
 1470 SYMBOL 80,&DC,&E6,&C6,&C6,&FC,&C0,&C0,&0
 1480 SYMBOL 81,&38,&6C,&C6,&C6,&CA,&64,&3A,&0
 1490 SYMBOL 82,&DC,&E6,&C6,&C6,&FC,&CC,&C6,&0
 1500 SYMBOL 83,&7C,&C6,&C0,&7C,&6,&C6,&7C,&0
 1510 SYMBOL 84,&FE,&B2,&30,&30,&30,&30,&30,&0
 1520 SYMBOL 85,&E6,&66,&C6,&C6,&C6,&C6,&7C,&0
 1530 SYMBOL 86,&E6,&66,&C6,&C6,&CC,&78,&30,&0
 1540 SYMBOL 87,&EC,&66,&C6,&C6,&D6,&D6,&6C,&0
 1550 SYMBOL 88,&EE,&C6,&6C,&38,&6C,&C6,&EE,&0
 1560 SYMBOL 89,&EE,&C6,&2C,&18,&18,&18,&18,&0
 1570 SYMBOL 90,&FE,&8C,&18,&30,&60,&C2,&FE,&0
 1580 SYMBOL 91,&7C,&64,&60,&60,&60,&60,&7C,&0
 1590 SYMBOL 92,&0,&60,&30,&10,&8,&C,&6,&0
 1600 SYMBOL 93,&3E,&6,&6,&6,&6,&26,&3E,&0
 1610 SYMBOL 94,&18,&24,&42,&42,&0,&0,&0,&0
 1620 SYMBOL 95,&0,&0,&0,&0,&0,&0,&EE,&BB
 1630 SYMBOL 96,&3C,&22,&78,&20,&78,&20,&7E,&0
 1640 SYMBOL 97,&0,&0,&74,&DC,&C4,&CC,&74,&0
 1650 SYMBOL 98,&C0,&C0,&DC,&E6,&C6,&E6,&DC,&0
 1660 SYMBOL 99,&0,&0,&78,&CC,&C0,&CC,&78,&0
 1670 SYMBOL 100,&0,&70,&18,&7C,&CC,&CC,&78,&0
 1680 SYMBOL 101,&0,&0,&78,&CC,&FC,&C0,&7C,&0
 1690 SYMBOL 102,&68,&74,&60,&F8,&60,&60,&60,&C0
 1700 SYMBOL 103,&0,&0,&78,&CC,&C0,&CC,&7C,&C
 1710 SYMBOL 104,&C0,&C0,&D8,&EC,&CC,&D8,&DC,&0
 1720 SYMBOL 105,&C,&0,&38,&18,&18,&18,&38,&0
 1730 SYMBOL 106,&6,&0,&1C,&C,&C,&C,&4C,&38
 1740 SYMBOL 107,&C0,&C0,&CC,&D8,&F0,&D8,&CE,&0
 1750 SYMBOL 108,&30,&30,&30,&30,&30,&36,&3E,&0
 1760 SYMBOL 109,&0,&0,&AC,&D6,&D6,&C6,&CC,&0
 1770 SYMBOL 110,&0,&0,&BC,&C6,&C6,&CC,&DE,&0
 1780 SYMBOL 111,&0,&0,&7C,&C6,&C6,&C6,&7C,&0
 1790 SYMBOL 112,&0,&0,&DC,&E6,&C6,&E6,&DC,&C0
 1800 SYMBOL 113,&0,&0,&76,&CE,&C6,&CE,&76,&6
 1810 SYMBOL 114,&0,&0,&DC,&E6,&C6,&FC,&C6,&0
 1820 SYMBOL 115,&0,&0,&3C,&60,&3C,&8E,&7C,&0
 1830 SYMBOL 116,&18,&30,&FC,&30,&30,&32,&1C,&0
 1840 SYMBOL 117,&0,&0,&E6,&66,&C6,&C6,&7A,&0
 1850 SYMBOL 118,&0,&0,&EC,&66,&C6,&EC,&38,&0
 1860 SYMBOL 119,&0,&0,&EC,&C6,&D2,&7C,&28,&0
 1870 SYMBOL 120,&0,&0,&EE,&6C,&38,&6C,&EE,&0
 1880 SYMBOL 121,&0,&0,&EC,&C6,&6C,&18,&30,&E0
 1890 SYMBOL 122,&0,&0,&FE,&9C,&30,&62,&FE,&0
 1900 SYMBOL 123,&C,&30,&30,&60,&30,&30,&C,&0
 1910 SYMBOL 124,&CF,&DB,&DB,&CF,&C3,&DB,&FB,&0
 1920 SYMBOL 125,&60,&18,&18,&C,&18,&18,&60,&0
 1930 SYMBOL 126,&7C,&C6,&BA,&A2,&BA,&C6,&7C,&0
 1940 SYMBOL 127,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF,&FF
 1950 RETURN

  • Keypunch029 — for all your punched card font needs …

    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).

    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).

    Local copy: Keypunch029.zip.
    Fontlibrary link: Keypunch029

    The 029 (as it is sometimes known) generated a bitmap font from an engraved metal plate pressing on a matrix of pins. A picture of this plate from a field engineering manual was used to re-create the pin matrices, and thus an outline font.

    029 Code Plate
    029 Code Key

    Historical Accuracy

    The 029 could have many different code plates, but the one used here contained the characters:

    <=>¬|_-,;:!?/.'"()@¢$*&#%+0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

    The character glyphs have been sized such that if printed at 12 points, the 029’s character pitch of 0.087″ is accurately reproduced. No attempt to research the pin matrix pitch or pin diameter has been made: the spacing was eyeballed from a couple of punched cards in my collection.

    The earlier IBM Type 26 Card Punch (“026”) included a glyph for a square lozenge (Unicode U+2311, ⌑). The 029 code plate did not include this character, but I added it here for completeness.

    The character set was extended to include:

    • all of ASCII, with lower case characters repeating the upper case glyphs;
    • sterling currency symbol; and
    • euro currency symbol.

    While there may have been official IBM renditions of some of these additional glyphs (with the exception of euro) no attempt has been made to research the original shapes. This font set is intended to help with the visually accurate reproduction of 1960s-era punched cards, mostly coinciding with my interest in the FORTRAN programming language. No attempt has been made to use historical BCD/EBCDIC encodings in these fonts. We have Unicode now.

    The 029 card punch could not produce any bold or italic font variants, but FontForge can, so I did.

    Things I learned in making these fonts

    1. The 029 card punch printer could be damaged if you tried to print binary cards, as there was no way to disengage the code plate from the punch mechanism.
    2. FontForge really hates to have paths in a glyph just touching. Either keep them more than one unit apart, or overlap them and merge the overlapping paths.
    3. EBCDIC is weird.

    Sources

  • PoorFish, v2

    On FontLibrary: PoorFish

    Local copy: PoorFish.zip

    Full Language Support: Afrikaans, Baltic, Basic Latin, Catalan, Central European, Dutch, Esperanto, Euro, Turkish, Western European. Terrible kerning comes free.

    (original version from 2010: PoorFish)

  • Library Hand – Disjoint


    LibHandDis — Based on scans of “Library Hand – Disjoint”, described in Dana’s A Library Primer, with some modifications.

    Major changes from scan:

    • As the scan only covered A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and ‘&’, I had to make the rest up.
    • Many of the descenders had to be shortened to fit with modern typography conventions.
    • Kerning is much tighter than Dana’s guidelines suggest.

    (idea for this came via MetaFilter, This question of library handwriting is an exceedingly practical one)

    Local copy: LibHandDis.zip.

  • The punctuation is a farce, the kerning is ropey – but here’s my attempt at Dana’s Library Hand

    The punctuation is a farce, the kerning is ropey – but here’s my attempt at Dana’s Library Hand

    Update: don’t use this terrible thing. Margo Burns has made an amazing version: Dana Library Hand.

    Instagram filter used: Normal

    View in Instagram ⇒

  • a font for the person you’re just dotty about

    LoveMatrix is a lo-fi dot matrix font made of ♥♥♥s. It’s a seasonally-adjusted version of my mnicmp font.

    Local copy: LoveMatrix.zip

  • mnicmp: the DECwriter lives again!

    I just made and uploaded this to FontLibrary: mnicmp.

    This is meant more as an exercise in learning FontForge‘s programming back-end, and definitely showed me that FontForge is incredibly powerful. After the learning comes silliness, so I ended up turning the dots into something like:

    I learned you really have to consider a dot-matrix font to be an array of points rather than a glyph, because otherwise you get the dots coming out the wrong sort of oval:

    Blue font has been italicized as a whole, while the black dots were done properly

    You don’t want to know what it did to the stars …

    Local archive: mnicmp.zip

  • BlockTwo, a dreadful font

    blocktwo-demo

    BlockTwo is a spectacularly ugly font mostly for playing about with 3D intersections in OpenSCAD. Not recommended for any but the most extreme display usage. Coverage is only A-Z caps, 0-9, heart and block.

    Font Library link: BlockTwo
    Local copy: blocktwo.zip

  • ThreeFourTwoTwo

    sampleYup, another highly impractical monospaced font. This one is based on a short-lived 22 segment display made in the early 1980s by Litronix (datasheet).

    It’s also on Fontlibrary: ThreeFourTwoTwo.

    Local download: ThreeFourTwoTwo .

    If you use this font red on a dark background and under-print the ¤ character in a faint colour, you get an approximation of the LED segment mask:

    led

  • TwentyfourSixteen – a 17-segment alpha LCD font

    2416-demo

    Download: TwentyfourSixteen.zip.

    Made in 2016 by Stewart C. Russell – scruss.com

    A mono-spaced font family derived from the HP/Siemens/Litronix DL-2416 17-segment alphanumeric 17 segment LED display matrix.

    Design size: appx 19 pt

    For maximum fidelity, should be displayed/printed red to match the original’s ~640 nm wavelength. This corresponds to RGB #ff2100

    Weights

    Regular only.

    Note that this has a very slight skew (5°) built in.

    Coverage

    ASCII only, upper case.

    Author

    Stewart C. Russell – http://scruss.com/blog/

    Licence

    Dual-licensed CC0/WTFPL (srsly)

    All of the segments. I've stashed this glyph at character code U+007f so you can make up new ones.
    All of the segments. I’ve stashed this glyph at character code U+007f so you can make up new ones.

    also: numbers.zip — just 00-99 as PNG images, after this, made with Pango, like this:

    for f in {00..99}
do
 pango-view --no-display --background=black --dpi=112 --align=right --foreground='#ff2100' --font='TwentyfourSixteen Regular 48' --hinting=full --output="$f.png" -t "$f"
done

  • FifteenTwenty: now on Fontlibrary and github

    FifteenTwenty-demo

    Use it / download it here: FifteenTwenty on fontlibrary.org
    Download it / fork it here: scruss/FifteenTwenty on github
    Local copy: FifteenTwenty-master.zip (268K; includes FontForge sources)

  • FifteenTwenty UltraLight: single-stroke OTF for CNC/plotting

    Screenshot from 2016-05-08 17-18-31Following on from FifteenTwenty, I made a hairline/single stroke version of the font especially for CNC use. This is a slight misuse of the OpenType format, but if you’re plotting/CNCing/laser cutting, the filled paths of standard fonts don’t work so well. Single-line (or stroke) fonts used to be possible in PostScript — the version of Courier shipped with early Apple LaserWriter printers was composed of strokes, rather than filled paths — but have fallen out of favour. If you have a device with a defined tool width, it’s better to let the tool make the width of the mark/cut. Here’s the hairline font plotted with a 0.7 mm pen to illustrate what I mean:

    1520hairlineThis font is almost invisible on screen or on a regular printer, so I don’t recommend installing it unless you have specific CNC/plotting needs. Please note that the font will cause your device to follow the tool path of each letter twice.

    Download: FifteenTwenty-master.zip FifteenTwenty-UltraLight.zip (or more options …)

  • when fillets go bad

    f8

    accidentally mis-sizing fillets on a character lead to this …

  • Precisely what nobody wanted — the Hershey fonts as a huge great PDF

    HersheyNumberedOccidentalGrid-section

    It’s impractically huge, but under the image link lives a table of all of the Hershey fonts (well, the Western ones, at least). It’s interesting to note Dr Hershey’s preferences in this pre-ASCII table: almost every variant has degree, minute and second symbols, but none of them have ‘\’. Many of them don’t have ‘@’, either, so no e-mail addresses in Hershey Fraktur for you …

  • Forgive me, A V Hershey …

    Forgive me, A V Hershey …

    I’ve been playing with the Hershey Fonts, vector data digitised by the US government in 1967. It’s in a bit of a bear of a format.

    I hope to do more fun stuff with the data. For now, here’s an 120 page sample book showing all the characters:

    hershey_sample_page