I love new fonts, especially bitmap fonts. However, with pixels on screens getting smaller and smaller, bitmap fonts are often almost unusable. This is a sad state of affairs, because high-resolution bitmap fonts look extremely crisp on a display with tiny pixels. But there’s not many of them! Does anybody here know any high-quality bitmap fonts that look LARGE on hidpi screens? They must be 32 pixels height, for example.
The unifont is beautiful, but incredibly small when mapped pixel to pixel. If you zoom-it by a factor 2, it looks blocky, defeating the whole purpose of your display.
Even with the scaling, it looked really good and I wanted to figure out what font it was. Took a while to figure out it was XNU’s own font, so I got it.
Lavender should look good with 2x scaling too, but i’m not sure.
I feel like bitmap fonts look really crisp in general. I can’t stand the blurry mess of anti-aliased fonts (don’t get me started on subpixel rendering). Windows used to be really good at applying various sizes of pixel-perfect bitmap fonts in its UI, but even they transitioned to the blurry mess after Windows 7. Nothing beats a font that was drawn by a skilled human, pixel for pixel. I always use raster/bitmap fonts in my terminals and IDEs if possible. As for scaling, you can just take a smaller one and upscale it by a whole integer factor. It still looks great.
Which font(s) do you like? I have preferred Terminus for many years, though I have been on mere 1080p HD for a while, so I don’t know if it would hold up in 4k or Retina, etc.
That’s great! I love it. Did you generate the large sizes automatically from the smaller, or you drew all of them by hand? Any plans for greek characters?
I love new fonts, especially bitmap fonts. However, with pixels on screens getting smaller and smaller, bitmap fonts are often almost unusable. This is a sad state of affairs, because high-resolution bitmap fonts look extremely crisp on a display with tiny pixels. But there’s not many of them! Does anybody here know any high-quality bitmap fonts that look LARGE on hidpi screens? They must be 32 pixels height, for example.
The unifont is beautiful, but incredibly small when mapped pixel to pixel. If you zoom-it by a factor 2, it looks blocky, defeating the whole purpose of your display.
Funnily enough, what inspired me to make this was seeing this screenshot: https://www.puredarwin.org/Screenshots/Screenshot-2018-03-02.png
Even with the scaling, it looked really good and I wanted to figure out what font it was. Took a while to figure out it was XNU’s own font, so I got it.
Lavender should look good with 2x scaling too, but i’m not sure.
I think they mean a raster font for larger screens, not necessary a font with characters that are 8x8 pixels.
A bitmap font hand-optimized for larger screens sounds really cool. 32x32 pixels or whatever per glyph brings a lot of resolution.
I feel like bitmap fonts look really crisp in general. I can’t stand the blurry mess of anti-aliased fonts (don’t get me started on subpixel rendering). Windows used to be really good at applying various sizes of pixel-perfect bitmap fonts in its UI, but even they transitioned to the blurry mess after Windows 7. Nothing beats a font that was drawn by a skilled human, pixel for pixel. I always use raster/bitmap fonts in my terminals and IDEs if possible. As for scaling, you can just take a smaller one and upscale it by a whole integer factor. It still looks great.
Which font(s) do you like? I have preferred Terminus for many years, though I have been on mere 1080p HD for a while, so I don’t know if it would hold up in 4k or Retina, etc.
I’ve avoided buying a hi-dpi screen at least partly because I like bitmap fonts so much.
I created Spleen for exactly this reason, it comes in five sizes, including 16x32 and 32x64: https://github.com/fcambus/spleen
That’s great! I love it. Did you generate the large sizes automatically from the smaller, or you drew all of them by hand? Any plans for greek characters?
i always like more fonts :)
I didn’t knew I needed this in my life.
Thanks skrzyp :)
i have been using terminus for quite a while now. check it out, you might like it.
I’ve used Terminus in the past, it’s very good indeed.
Props for having girlfriends in the example screenshot. Also, nice font :)
This comment made a lot more sense when I realized that “Girlfriends” is a band.
Thanks! And yeah, Girlfriends is awesome!