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Comment by zeta0134 | Hacker News Reader

These look absolutely delightful! A quick question: I'm working on retro consoles, and so I need fonts where each glyph is a multiple of 8px wide for easy display on tile-based backgrounds. Are the sizes (in pixels) of your font packs listed anywhere?

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My own collection of free 8x8 fonts might suit your needs at https://damieng.com/zx-origins

Looking forward to trying this exciting rust tool in my chain as well to see what additional formats I can include.

(Update: Seems the PIFO tool is not open-source :( I guess I'll stick to using scripts + FontLab Studio 5)

I also took a look and couldn't find any info. If you want to take a leap of faith, once you buy the assets there's metadata files including individual glyph sizes and kerning info so you could find all the ones that fit your project

Check out The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack (https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/). Each font description includes glyph dimensions and aspect ratios

The example tile sheet in the article appears to be 8 pixels wide by my count. Count the width in pixels on the "m" and if it's 7 the font will likely work for you.

The main issue is you can't have them literally touching or it'll be really hard to read. Maybe it would work, but most of these "pixel art" fonts really benefit from some faking enabled by running on what's actually a high resolution display.

That's why I said the "m" should only be 7 bits wide for an 8 bit wide font.

It's a trade-off. Have every single instance of m look squished vs it might touch another m or w somewhere else and look odd.

I've done fonts in both categories.

> each glyph is a multiple of 8px wide

These look to be variable-width fonts. I believe the heights are multiples of 16, but the width will vary by character.

It appears that the "tile sheet" export puts the fonts on a fixed width grid, so that can be used for a fixed width font. They look left-justified in the grid though, and fixed width fonts usually have the glyphs centered in their grid. That could be fixed with some scripting.

They are variable-width yes but there is also a monospace variation, those will be constant width.

16. Or an integer multiple of that like 32 or 64. It's in the Step 5: Exporting section

Edit: that's the height, the width is not fixed/I think it varies with the exact font and the kerning. It's probably too big for you anyways.

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