Cozette

A bitmap programming font optimized for coziness.

Contents

• About Cozette
• Installation
  • Linux
  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Notes on specific applications
    • Dmenu
    • VSCode, general GUI applications
    • Kitty
  • Variants
• Roadmap
• Recommended alternatives
• Character map
• Building
• Contributors
• License

About Cozette

Cozette is a 6x13px (bounding box; average 5px character width, 3px descent, 10px ascent, 8px cap height) bitmap font based on Dina, which itself is based on Proggy. It's also heavily inspired by Creep. I absolutely adore Creep, and was using it up until I got a higher-DPI screen for which it was slightly too small. That prompted me to make the bitmap font I always wished existed: Cozette; a small-but-not-tiny bitmap font with great coverage of all the glyphs you might encounter in the terminal:

I'm intentionally putting the emphasis on "you" - although Cozette already has all the glyphs I've seen in my CLI tools so far, you might find it's missing a glyph you wish it had. If that's the case, please file an issue! It's an important goal for Cozette to be a useful bitmap alternative to Nerd Fonts.

A nicer character map that includes the codepoints can be found at the bottom of this README!

Installation

You can get Cozette over at the Releases tab!

Variants and Sizes

Cozette is distributed in three main variants: normal and hi-dpi (upscaled 2x) bitmaps (.bdf, .otb, .psf, and .fnt), and vectors (.ttf).

Font scaling varies wildly from system to system, and sometimes even from program to program and font format to format. On my system (Linux), cozette.otb looks right at 13pts; cozette_hidpi.otb looks right at 26pts and downscales quite elegantly to 10pts; CozetteVector doesn't look right at any size (technically, it will look right specifically at 9.4pts on a 100dpi screen on Linux, but pixel-perfect bitmap fonts are a massive headache, treated differently by every OS, that I'm not quite sure how to solve)

Bitmap fonts are, effectively, just that - bitmaps. They scale terribly, but look nice and sharp (and pixel-perfect) at one specific point size. Vector fonts scale well, but in this case, might look ugly at smaller point sizes because of antialiasing issues and the like.

NOTE:

The vector formats (`CozetteVector`) are provided as a compatibility feature. Rendering of vectorized bitmap-like fonts is terrible on virtually all operating systems.

If Cozette looks awful on your system, you probably have a vector version. Please use the bitmap formats (.otb) if you can.

Issues with vector formats will almost certainly not be fixed or addressed; Cozette is a bitmap font first and foremost, and building a bitmap font that builds from a single source and looks good both in its intended, bitmap font as well as as the auto-vectorized format, on every OS, seems to be an unsolved problem.

Linux

The preferred format is .otb (for bitmaps) or .ttf (for CozetteVector). To install the font, just throw it in your fonts directory (you probably want to follow your distro's instructions). On Ubuntu you might need to specifically enable bitmap fonts.

If you're on Arch, ifreund made an AUR package for the .otb! Install it using your AUR helper of choice:

$ yay -S cozette-otb

Or, if you're not using an AUR helper:

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/cozette-otb.git
$ cd cozette-otb
$ makepkg -si

Mac

Download the .dfont and install it with Font Book .app. Both the bitmap Cozette.dfont and the vector CozetteVector.dfont should work.

Windows

Grab CozetteVector.ttf. If you want to get the bitmap versions to work, follow the instructions from here.

FreeBSD

laxul made a port for the .otb!

• pkg: pkg install cozette
• ports: cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/cozette; make install clean

Other BSD / Solaris / Haiku / Other

You know what you're doing.

Notes on specific applications

Dmenu

dmenu (and reportedly some other applications, like urxvt) seems slightly fucky when it comes to dealing with font spacing. I cannot tell if this is an issue with Cozette specifically or with the font rendering in those applications, but they seem to pull the font spacing from your system's default monospace font for whatever reason. If setting Cozette as your system default is not an option (I don't recommend it, a lot of applications have problems with bitmap fonts), try using Cozette-<size> as the font name, ie. Cozette-8.

VSCode, general GUI applications

VSCode and a lot of other GUI applications don't support bitmap fonts, so you will want to use CozetteVector there. In applications that do support bitmap fonts, you will want to use the normal, bitmap Cozette (unless it's too small for you, in which case, CozetteVector scales better).

Kitty

4e554c4c made an AUR package for kitty patched to support bitmap fonts.

if you like bitmap fonts, kitty is not for you.

According to its author, kitty doesn't, and never will, support bitmap fonts.

If you really want to get Cozette working, you can try the AUR package mentioned above, or apply the patch there yourself.

If that doesn't work, you can try the trick from here; if you explicitly set Cozette(Vector)'s spacing to 100, and scalable to true in fontconfig, kitty should accept it.

You can also make Cozette work flawlessly by uninstalling kitty and using a terminal emulator for which not rendering fonts isn't a design principle - I cannot recommend alacritty enough. it's excellent, has worked flawlessly for me for quite some time, and both configuring and getting bitmap fonts to work in it is a breeze.

(The support was discussed in slavfox/Cozette#18. Many thanks to all the participants there, especially to to Luflosi, who brought up flipping the allow_bitmapped_fonts flag in their fork, and to 4e554c4c, who made the AUR package.)

Roadmap

Check the CHANGELOG for the latest news!

Here's where Cozette is so far, in the rough order the features are going to be implemented:

• ASCII
• Powerline
• Build scripts to handle exporting
• Box-drawing (mostly)
• Braille
• Cyrillic!
• APL Glyphs (based on the list from APL386)!
• Uiua glyphs!
• BQN Glyphs!
• Nerdfonts:
  • nf-pom-*
  • nf-seti-*
  • nf-dev-* (partial)
  • nf-weather-*
• Glyph map generation (so I don't have to keep characters.png up to date)
• "True" TTF version
  • Windows support
• Full vim-airline support!
• Full ranger_devicons support!
• starship supported out of the box!
• Full powerlevel10k support! (if it doesn't work, try setting POWERLEVEL9K_MODE to nerdfont-complete)
• All glyphs used by maturin and many other CLI tools!
• Charmap including the code points (to make it easier for users to report issues/request additions)
• Codepoints above U+FFFF in vector fonts
• Upscaled hi-dpi variant

Recommended alternatives

Cozette is, intentionally, a very small font. If neither the base nor the HiDpi version fit your needs, you might want to look at some other bitmap fonts with extra glyphs. A couple of my favorites are Tamzen and Envypn. You might also find the Tecate/bitmap-fonts repo useful.

Character map

For easy copy-pasting, the character map is provided in text form in img/charmap.txt. If you just want to see how the glyphs look in Cozette, here is a screenshot of it:

Building

If you want to build Cozette yourself, you'll need FontForge and Java. Once you have that, just clone this repo, open Cozette/Cozette.sfd in FontForge, and go to File → Generate Fonts....

To run the build scripts I use to prepare releases, first install Python (at least 3.8) and pipenv. For generating the images, you will also need xorg-mkfontscale and xterm. Then, install the dependencies and run build.py fonts:

$ pipenv install
$ pipenv run python build.py fonts

Then install the generated fonts, and run

$ pipenv run python build.py images

Running

$ pipenv run python build.py changelog

will output the changelog between your local version and the last tag.

Contributors

Massive thanks to ym1234 for helping me figure out how to make the font tables behave nicely.

Thanks to autumn, cpkio, yoshiyoshyosh, klinegareth, and dariof4 for contributing characters!

License & Acknowledgements

Cozette is licensed MIT 💜

Cozette's builds use bdfscale by philj56 and Bits'N'Picas by Kreative Software.