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Creep – a pretty sweet 4px wide pixel font

529 points| pabs3 | 4 years ago |github.com | reply

106 comments

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[+] infogulch|4 years ago|reply
This is great! Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 2016 and isn't suitable for applications outside Terminal.app. But apparently someone else took up the mantle and rebuilt it to solve those issues and published it as creep2:

https://github.com/raymond-w-ko/creep2

> I love romeovs's creep font, but I think you could only use it well in Apple's Terminal.app because it has negative line and character width spacing, which the font requires to be spaced correctly. The root cause of this appears to be because some glyphs are bigger than the 5px by 11px bounding box, causing most terminals to think a much bigger box is necessary for the general ASCII glyphs.

> In order to fix this issue, I manually hand painted all the glyphs from the 'creep' font in fontforge.

Awesome! I just wish creep2 added some of those sweet demo photos that are in the creep README.

[+] vletal|4 years ago|reply
Thanks for the link! My tiny little display attached to RPi is very much looking forward to trying it out.
[+] GekkePrutser|4 years ago|reply
Does a font really need regular updates?

But it's probably possible to convert Mac fonts somehow

[+] thih9|4 years ago|reply
> some glyphs are bigger than the 5px by 11px bounding box

Out of curiosity, which ones? Did anyone find them?

[+] romeovs|4 years ago|reply
Hi everyone, quite unexpected to see this on the frontpage of Hacker News!

I made this so many years ago but I'm not using it myself anymore and I haven't been maintaining it.

I was (and am) also very inexperienced making fonts so the result was "good enough for my own limited use case" but too broken for general use, so it's good to see other people taking it and running with it, fixing my oversights and improving things.

Questions or suggestions are more than welcome.

[+] Valodim|4 years ago|reply
> good to see other people taking it and running with it, fixing my oversights and improving things

The readme looks so polished that I was surprised about this. Perhaps add a note to this effect at the top, maybe point to one of the forks?

[+] IgorPartola|4 years ago|reply
This is fun. As I’m working on my little hobby project that is custom air quality meters I am using 128x64 screens that are about an inch on the diagonal. I ended up having to create a custom pixel font that would work for both 6pt and 8pt height plus some icons in each. It’s been a really fun experience and rewarding too.
[+] malux85|4 years ago|reply
This project sounds cool, I’d love to see a blog post about it and some pictures!
[+] crazygringo|4 years ago|reply
Nice!

Nitpick though -- by standard convention for terminal fonts shouldn't it be called a 5px wide font? (4px for the letterform, 1px in between.) Since they're sized according to the pixels available for each character.

I was really wondering how on earth letters would be clear with just 3px left for the letterform... :S

[+] kortex|4 years ago|reply
The $ is 5 pixel points, so I think this is a case of "px" being more of a term of art rather than actually being 4 pixels wide per letter. I think. Would appreciate clarification.
[+] infofarmer|4 years ago|reply
> I love you all, so please use this font as much as you like for free. However, I would like to make sure you provide others the same liberty in creep's new incarnations. Therefore creep is licensed under the MIT License.

Happy it’s permissively licensed under MIT, but I wonder if the author intended to use a sticky license instead.

[+] chrisseaton|4 years ago|reply
What’s a sticky licence?
[+] euske|4 years ago|reply
There are tiny Japanese fonts that support all Chinese characters. This means they have 7000+ characters with 8x8 (or even 6x8) grid, most of which are pretty legible IMO. It's amazing.

Misaki (8x8 pixels): https://littlelimit.net/misaki.htm

k6x8 (6x8 pixels): https://littlelimit.net/k6x8.htm

[+] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
This is really cool! I always wondered if the japanese alphabet could be rendered like this. I found the hiragana and katakana characters to be easy to read but the kanji was really hard. I'm a beginner though...
[+] urthor|4 years ago|reply
Ootl, why does the character set have "whisky" in the middle haha.
[+] DonHopkins|4 years ago|reply
I recently posted this in the hoard-of-bitmaps thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27781606

It should include the 3x5 pixel font from Mike Koss's "The Terminal" on the Apple ][.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142258

>DonHopkins on Oct 4, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Sans Forgetica, a font designed to help you rememb...

Who can possibly forget the font that Mike Koss's "The Terminal" Apple ][ terminal emulator used to get 32 lines of 70 characters each in HIRES graphics mode in 1981? It's the most difficult to read font I've ever used regularly! (Don't try using it on a color TV, though.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20120206091422/http://mckoss.com...

>Tiny (3x5) Font

>Created for the Apple II program The Terminal. Copyright (c) 1981 Michael C. Koss

>In 1981 I wrote a terminal emulator for the Apple II. At the time, the Apple II could only display upper case characters. I used the hi-res display (280 x 192 pixels!) to display my own character set. In order to come close to showing an 80-column display, I created a truly tiny font, displaying the full ASCII character set (upper and lower case).

>I created a font within a 3x5 pixel dimension, allowing the display of 32 lines of 70 characters each. The font definitely takes some training and getting used to (especially recognition of characters that use descenders); but I found it to be quite readable after a while.

[+] saladuh|4 years ago|reply
If anyone's looking for a bitmap/pixel font that covers many symbols, including all necessary powerline symbols and a large portion of the various nerd font symbols, I can't recommend Cozette[0] enough. Recently the author has began updating and releasing new versions after a hiatus. Also, if you use the otf version of the font instead of the bitmap/otb version you can still get it to look like a pixel perfect bitmap font by setting the font to a specific size in the application, usually size 9 or 9.5 depending on the app or terminal.

[0] https://github.com/slavfox/Cozette

[+] app4soft|4 years ago|reply
The only problem with Cozette is that it is 5px wide pixel font.

So, here is comparison of minimal LCD width required to print "Hacker News" (without quotations marks):

- in Cozette: 65px

- in Creep: 54px

[+] crispyalmond|4 years ago|reply
So glad to see this receiving updates again. Love this font.
[+] dbolgheroni|4 years ago|reply
The Spleen font has, among other sizes, the 5x8, which is pretty similar. It's the default for OpenBSD drm console, although using a different size. It's constantly being updated.

https://github.com/fcambus/spleen

[+] zserge|4 years ago|reply
Nice and clean! I have been playing around the possibility to make a 2x3 bitmap font, but that turned out to be rather a cryptic constellation of pixels than a proper font: https://zserge.com/posts/tiny-font/
[+] jerrre|4 years ago|reply
Nice experiment! Would be nice to see some example text in the end..
[+] jolmg|4 years ago|reply
Wow. I've been using 5px wide Fixed[1] for years because I'd never seen another font that is as readable that small, but this seems pretty nice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface)

[+] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
There are a fair amount of what you'll see described as 5px wide fonts, but are actually 4px wide. Just that every character has a blank column on the far right so that you can simplistically put chars one after the other.

So you sometimes have to actually look at, for example, the H or W glyph to see if they really mean "5px wide" or not.

This image, for example, is the "5x8 Spleen" font. If you zoom in, though, you can see it's really a 4px wide font: https://camo.githubusercontent.com/b2fa71fde615bd5510b5e9cb9...

[+] fouc|4 years ago|reply
Do you use 5px as your primary terminal/editor font size? What sort of screen/resolution do you use?
[+] Semiapies|4 years ago|reply
A font for people with excellent vision who want very much to fix that.
[+] mrweasel|4 years ago|reply
If people like fonts like that, it's great that it's available, but it's not for me any more.

My vision isn't even bad and I don't require glasses, but I have turned 40 and I want retina monitors and a 18pt font.

[+] eric4smith|4 years ago|reply
Haha All I can think about is how I need to whip out my strong spectacles.

Thank goodness the era of using tiny fonts in UI design is mostly over and people have realized that us visually impaired folk still need to work.

Still, a nice project

[+] mncharity|4 years ago|reply
> my strong spectacles

With some VR HMDs, like Lenovo Explorer WMR, the strong lenses magnify pixels big enough to 'easily' see separately, in the clear center of the field of view. But don't provide many such clear pixels. So for editing code, using an HMD as non-VR terminal, I used tiny fonts (before switching to subpixel rendering of slightly larger fonts).

[+] LeoPanthera|4 years ago|reply
What software is available for designing pixel fonts with? It's something I've always wanted to try.