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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

Honestly, this sucks and it renders the font useless for a lot of purposes. I wanted to use it in an embedded system, but that seems out of the question now.

$ and & using the normally-blank column doesn't render the font "useless". If you want that column to always be blank, then just trim it.

It's just not mathematically possible to draw a proper "$" 4 pixels wide, since you need at least 2 pixels one each side of the vertical line to draw the enclosed areas.

Given the M and W I don't think "mathematically possible" is the criteria here.

Here's some options that fit in 4 pixels: https://i.imgur.com/LtQ6eb7.png

Some of these can look like $ if they're really tiny, but generally you'll need a while to figure out what's they're supposed to mean if you don't know what you're looking for.

Top right is the winner for me

Nice. Third from the left on top is great -- pretty unambiguous, and consistent with the w's and m's.

or:

   #
  ###
  #
  ###
    #
  ###
   #

This. It’s what the C64 (and I guess many/most early home computers) did. No need to draw the whole vertical line if it doesn’t reasonably fit.

…and now I realized that even the ubiquitous IBM VGA 8x16 font does this! Single-pixel-wide counters would just look really bad, and even more bad on CRT monitors.

> It's just not mathematically possible to draw a proper "$" 4 pixels wide

> Here's some options that fit in 4 pixels

So which is it?

I assume that "proper $" means the middle line is fully drawn, forming the two closed spaces at the upper left and lower right.

Can be pulled off with enough context https://i.imgur.com/pXA69Xw.png

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