Another format conversion of a specific size misc-fixed font, with the goal of pixel perfect rendering at the target size, as well as a few additions and changes of my own.

Installing

• For Mac OS

  • Install Fixed6x13/Fixed6x13*.ttf using the system FontBook application

  To achieve pixel perfect rendering, you will also need to (at least):

  • Disable the non-integer display scaling which is applied by default:

    • System Preferences → Displays → Resolution = Scaled
    • Select the scaling where the actual display resolution (from About This Mac → Displays) is an integer multiple of what the scaling claims to "look like". Eg, for me that's half.

    Note that this will "zoom" your entire screen! If that makes no sense, then you're probably in the wrong place – "This isn't the font you're looking for" – click here to continue

  • Disable "font smoothing"

      defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0
    

• Other systems – no idea! Probably it should work, but let us know about any shenanigans you had to pull to achieve pixel perfection for your favorite platform.

Notes

• The Unicode extension of the original BDF font was obtained from [1]. A copy of the files for our target size is included here for completeness.

• The generated font is not hinted, so requires rendering at specific sizes to be pixel perfect.

• Looks best at (integer multiples of) 13 display pixels, but also works fine above ~24px. Becomes blurry at smaller sizes or near but not 13px.

• You can check the rendering by opening Fixed6x13/*chars.txt, which lists all of the characters supported by the font, and comparing that to the corresponding PNG. Probably by screenshot and zoom in, also ImageMagick can compare images.

• Some characters have been added and changed; the tooling is included so you can always regenerate from the original, if preferred:

        python -m bdf2ttf misc-fixed/6x13.bdf
  

The Backstory

Some time ago, due to a series of unfortunate life choices which we shall refer to only as "The Mojave Incident", I found myself mid-development and completely screwed (yeah, but dark mode!). Overnight:

The latest build of the application now showed only a blank window.

My antiquated development environment was completely non-functional.

I couldn't even open an editor!

Well, after the disbelief ("Maybe something just didn't install correctly?"), the cursing ("How could they deprecate the whole thing on me‽"), the management intervention ("Can I just restore from backup…?") and the salty tears of aged procrastination ("This is my own damn fault…"), I eventually decided to drag my sorry ass into more modern times and set about to sort each of these issues, starting with the simple things that we sometimes take for granted, like the ability to edit text files.

I eventually settled on an editor and I got used to a lot of new things ("Oh, OK, we do it that way now"). But, even as this new age started to coalesce, something always "felt off" to me, the code just didn't look right.

It was like that bitter undertone ruining a great smelling cup of coffee, or the intermittent movement in your periphery that keeps drawing your eye, or an annoying sound that you can't seem to tune out. The immersion was broken, I couldn't stay in the zone; even in the midst of hacking away I would get distracted from the content by the presentation.

Of course, the font I had been using to edit code (for years) was deprecated along with everything else. I explored alternatives, but could never find a workable replacement. When you're working with code, there is a delicate balance in the density of information: too sparse doesn't present enough context – like playing an FPS with a tiny FoV, or walking around with binoculars strapped to your face – and too dense becomes illegible or can even cause eye strain, depending on the font.

There are several aspects of a font that affect the legibility / density tradeoff. The size is an obvious one, but also the width or aspect ratio, the weight or thickness of the strokes and definitely the sharpness at smaller sizes.

This is a very personal preference that's different for everyone; we all have different environments, eyesight and taste. For myself, I need a semicondensed font (with relatively tall, narrow letters) to optimize the horizontal real estate on my laptop screen. It needs to be small enough that most fonts start to get blurry and for many the strokes get too thin. If only some artist would craft a pixel perfect font to these specifications… but wait, they already did, it's just in the wrong format!

This is not the worlds first attempt to do just this, with these exact fonts, and there are plenty of tools out there to vectorize your old bitmap fonts. I did explore some of those paths, but none of them were able to meet my … quality bar. The first pass of this project took a weekend of hacking and I've used the result for years – totally worth it. Recently, I found the need to add a few more characters, so I resurrected this hacky mess and took some time for clean up and to more extensively validate the result for release.

So, I would like to think that this is not purely nostalgic, that I'm not simply inflexible, that there is a modern font out there I could be happy with; but, now I have comfortable old misc-fixed 6x13 semicondensed and none of that matters anymore.

— Enjoy!

License

The original misc-fixed BDF fonts were placed in the public domain.

Public domain font. Share and enjoy.

Out of respect and gratitude to the upstream authors, this rest of this project is similarly marked with CC0 – "No Rights Reserved".