I was making some new bricks to add to Brick Basket when the idea of a segmented display made from composites occurred to me. The result is this experimental 25-segment display.
This achieves some interesting "double line"/"folded line" effects. It also gets some pecuilar distortions at smaller sizes.
Version 2.6
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Inspired by a comment by jonrgrover.
I built diamonds sized according to the Fibonacci series, then made a segmented display out of them. The design was then carved away to make the glyphs you see here. I used the members 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8. These sizes proved most feasible to work with in this sort of arrangement.
I gave the terminals a flared appearance which I think makes the glyphs look slightly Celtic. The design also makes me think of beach sand and things found on the beach - shells, pretty rocks, and so on.
Want to see a magic trick? This font quickly loses readability when it is shrunk or enlarged from its original size! It's like an anti-font, judging you for wanting to use it.
I think this makes excellent placeholder text at small sizes, though to the uninitiated it might just look like blurry Braille.
This is a clone of CelLCDA 117-segment display made to have a more "mosaic" look. Try using this one at odd sizes, especially with antialiasing off! The resulting distortions occur in a consistent way which leads to many new uses for the font.
Original size: 38pt
Experimental 12-segment display. This is my attempt at making an ultra-small segmented display suitable for printing on actual pixel art screens. As far as I know, this is the first fusion of Latin-style microfont and segmented display.
Initially I tried making this with 3px long segments, but the result looked almost exactly like Calculatrix 12. So I shrank it down to 5x5 to ensure it would take on its own look.
Of course, your pixel art style still needs to be a pretty big one for this font to work well - I recommend a display area of 82*7px or more.
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See also:Pandora's Blocks
Experimental 33-segment display. While setting the spacing for Piscrypt Plain, I turned on monospacing and all the glyphs stacked up. I thought that made an interesting shape to design a segmented display on.
This has its own set of composite bricks; feel free to clone it and experiment!
Original size: 20pt
See also: Inkthorn, Miners Guild
A segmented display inspired by Lorica Segmentata.
I didn't make this to convey the idea of "Space Romans", but I can see how it might be used in such a context. For that I'm envisioning something like a flip-dot display which uses these metal plates. Perhaps in the future I'll get an Arduino and some servos, then set about trying to build such a display...
Experimental 37-segment display. Space pirates met crystalline aliens, their children made a segmented display, and this is it.
Now with lowercase!
See also: Apoplexy, Calculatrix.
Experimental 49-segment display.
In making and studying other segmented displays, I noticed they tended to have strong-looking right angled lines but weak-looking diagonals. This is my attempt to make a design where both styles of lines look more appealing and join together more solidly.
24-segment display. This one belongs to a small family called Calculatrix.
Like Calculatrix 12, this one is spaced so that every segment appears in its proper place, as if the text were being rendered on one giant display. (If using this in your own software, you will want to check the line spacing as it can vary depending on the software.)
I suppose this font could be used for weaving or embroidery work, as well... it has that look about it...
TIP: Try zooming out while already at Pixel size!
An experimental 12-segment display, and my 100th published Fontstruction. It's the calculator of yesterday's future!
This one belongs to a small family called Calculatrix.
This font is monospaced to ensure segments are always where they "should" be (as if the text were printed on one giant display).
This is is the most accurate HD44780 font you can find on FontStruct, because it has pixel-perfect representations of all 190 original characters (not including 0x00-0x0F, which are impossible on FontStruct)
0x00-0x0F are mapped to 0x100-0x10F since I can't add characters before 0x20.
Base ASCII plane from the character generator ROM of the ST7036 LCD controller, built as a fixed pitch font. This is missing the characters mapped on 0x00 through 0x1f, the first half of which could be user-defined characters loaded in RAM at run time, and hence really difficult to define in a font. I've also left off the katakana characters mapped from 0x80 to 0xFF, as I don't need them for my current requirement.
All charcters are 5x7 dots in a 6x8 dot character cell. All 6x8 dots are implemented on the panel, and the panels typically provide blank columns and rows between character cells, so I'm not entierly sure why the standard ROM image doesn't ever use the 6th column or 8th row. To mark the cell boundaries, I've included tick marks in each corner where that pixel is blank. If no extra leading or tracking is applied, those ticks will abut.
I've defined all of the obvious space characters to be blank, and also defined the Unicode NOT SIGN (U+00AC) as a blank to make it easier to draw screen images.