A version of "Western Traintop" with more characters. (Work In Progress.)
fi=Regular $ symbol
This is a clone of Western TraintopWhat began nearly 8 years ago as an experiment in multi-stage, multi-resolution pixel serif type drafting (starting smallish then manually upscaling x4), took on the robust character you see here after countless edits and some tricky lessons learned along the way.
The initial weight was on the light side (cloned privately for posterity), so I took a leap into this bookish weight by fattening each glyph copy-pasted 1 pixel shifted both up and to the right. A rudimentary technique, by no means novel, yet almost wholly effective. I saw fit from here to only make a handful of corrections, keeping the slightly rounded and slanted serif shape that resulted as well as the subtle reenforcing of a pen-nib construction.
More intriguing is the 1-bit “anti-aliasing” scheme I found myself progressively guided toward while finding the lines of these curves developing the initial light weight. Implied diagonals and said curves – as well as refinement of contrast – are substantially more granular and specific than had I taken a black-and-white posterized, or stairstepped approach.
At half-resolution, the resulting smoothness is acceptible. This type of hinting will be useful in developing a substitution rule set consisting of subpixel slanted or curved bricks to produce a “vectorized” version.
Indeed, such a process could be purely automated by a proficient developer or properly trained neural network (this would be a really interesting future feature for fontstruct pro – rather than hinting a font after painstaking vector construction, why not reverse the process by way of en vogue ai-assisted upscaling?).
Basic accented charaters and numerals are being added as I churn through the extended character set...
IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS FONT IS NO LONGER BEING WORKED ON. I HAVE A BIGGER FONT TO WORK ON FOR THE TIME BEING.
YOU ARE FREE TO CLONE AND FINISH THIS FONT IF YOU WANT.
Finally done. Phew! It took two days to make this. This is a full collection of 5×7 Dot Matrix characters as seen on many devices, like Texas Instruments calculators. A lot of these are custom. Sources include TI-83, TI-86, TI-89, Casio Monochrome Graphing Calculators, Casio fx-115ES PLUS, and the rest, I created them myself. I included fractions for those themes on Microsoft Office don't have matching "1/3" and other fractions with the "1/4", "1/2", and "3/4". The fullwidth characters are substitutes for the other characters in the regular style, such as the math "x" and "y" from Casio.
Please note that character sets like Arabic and some Math Operators are beyond 5×7 pixels. If you want to know why? Because Arabic is very big and if I put it all in 5×7 pixels, the text will look weird, won't really fit inside, and there would be no point to it. I left it as is. Roman Numerals cannot fit if you were doing the "VIII" character, for example.
Enjoy!
8/28/2019: Font created.
1/7/2020: Added characters in the following form: Fullwidth and Halfwidth are used for making TI-73 Explorer characters, plus actual monospace setting characters. Note that Runic, Tagalog, and Hanunoo are replaced with character variants. The last variation of a character is from Minecraft's font. The fractions are also changed to level the line spacing. The wide "M" is never ever for use on Monospacing.
1/8/2020: More variations are added, extended to replace Buhid. I also added other math symbols and more. To type x̄, press unicode shortcut and type 01b2. To type ȳ, press unicode shortcut and type 01b3. I also added over a hundred, or two hundred, more characters to stock up on the font. Oh and I changed the filters to separate the pixels for a more pixel and retro look. Also fixed the spacing on the "Щ" character.
9/8/2020: Added a bunch of more characters to the font set.
8/25/2023: fixed the license so that the download works now.
Recreation of the small pixel font from the european/north american release of Climax Entertainment/Sonic! Software Planning's "Shining Force" (1992) on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.
This font is unusual, as each character not only comprises two tiles (for its height), but also features characters that are wider than the maximum 8px tiles. In the game's tile set, this was achieved by using a custom encoding, where a single tile contains the combined values for two horizontal tiles.
See this short Twitter thread for a little dissection of the tile set.
The width of each character is also variable and encoded in the bottom tile for each character. Unfortunately, I was unable to work out the logic behind the width information bits - so, for characters used in the game, the correct width was matched manually, and for any characters not encountered (yet) in any of the dialog boxes, I took an educated guess...
Due to the complexity of this encoding, I won't tackle the hiragana/katakana large font from the japanese release.
Only the characters present in the game's tile set have been included