{"id":18135,"date":"2026-05-29T20:33:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T00:33:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=18135"},"modified":"2026-05-29T20:33:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T00:33:15","slug":"new-font-e73","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/29\/new-font-e73\/","title":{"rendered":"New font: E73"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A rendering of the ECMA-42 standard bitmap printer font from 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"736\" height=\"651\" src=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/E73-sample.png\" alt=\"Fixed width dot matrix font sample\" class=\"wp-image-18136\" srcset=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/E73-sample.png 736w, https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/E73-sample-320x283.png 320w, https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/E73-sample-160x142.png 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 736px) 100vw, 736px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">No descenders, and no two adjacent dots are filled, like all old 7-pin printers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-file\"><a id=\"wp-block-file--media-1b8456aa-772d-4cbe-87ca-e214f1c99606\" href=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/E73-Regular.zip\">E73-Regular.zip<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/scruss.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/E73-Regular.zip\" class=\"wp-block-file__button wp-element-button\" download aria-describedby=\"wp-block-file--media-1b8456aa-772d-4cbe-87ca-e214f1c99606\">Download<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Also on github: <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/scruss\/E73\">scruss\/E73: ECMA-42 standard printer font from 1973<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Name<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>E<\/em> from <em>ECMA<\/em>, and 1973 for its publication year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Coverage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">ASCII, mostly. The standard did not provide definitions for these characters:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>U+005F _ LOW LINE<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+0060 ` GRAVE ACCENT<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+007B { LEFT CURLY BRACKET<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+007D } RIGHT CURLY BRACKET<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+007E ~ TILDE<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As this is an attempt to faithfully implement a standard, these characters were not synthesized. In a slight concession to modernity, glyphs for A\u2013Z have been copied to a\u2013z.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The standard also defines the following extended characters:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>U+00A4 \u00a4 CURRENCY SIGN<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+00A3 \u00a3 POUND SIGN<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+00C6 \u00c6 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AE<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+00C5 \u00c5 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+00C4 \u00c4 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+00A7 \u00a7 SECTION SIGN<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+0132 \u0132 LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE IJ<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+00D6 \u00d6 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+00D8 \u00d8 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH STROKE<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>U+00DC \u00dc LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Design Size<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Variants<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">None. This is an attempt to reproduce the character forms exactly according to the standard document.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Source<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While this font is produced entirely by one Python <a href=\"https:\/\/fontforge.org\/\">FontForge<\/a> script, the code is too ugly to include here. The included <code>ecma42.json<\/code> is likely more useful: it contains all of the pin definitions keyed by character name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Licence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u00a9 2026 &#8211; Stewart Russell, scruss.com with Reserved Font Name E73<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence, Version 1.1. <br><a href=\"https:\/\/openfontlicense.org\/\">https:\/\/openfontlicense.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[I do not agree with SIL&#8217;s missionary work in any way, and the use of this licence is in no way an endorsement of SIL.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Reference<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/ecma-international.org\/publications-and-standards\/standards\/ecma-42\/\">ECMA-42: Alpha-numeric character set for 7&#215;9 matrix printers; 1st edition, December 1973<\/a> (<em>withdrawn<\/em>): \u201cThis Standard defines the printed image and the nominal dimensions of a font for 7\u00d79 matrix printers. The characters have been designed for both human and machine readability.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>new dot matrix font, created from the 1973 ECMA-42 standard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3375],"tags":[2409,1374,2958,2123],"class_list":["post-18135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-type","tag-dotmatrix","tag-font","tag-otf","tag-typography"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-4Iv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18135"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18139,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18135\/revisions\/18139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}