An eccentric bitmap microfont for all your spellcasting needs.
eldur /ˈɛldʏr/ n.
(Icelandic) fire.
A monospace bitmap font with a 5x13 bounding box (4px avg width, 3px descent, 10px ascent, 5px x-height, 8px cap height). It takes strong inspiration from upright-italic type to create a font that aims to balance aesthetics, compactness and readability at the 4-5px level.
Some glyphs come from scientifica and creep, often with modifications to adhere to eldur's design.
Download from Releases. Included are bitmap formats - OTB, BDF, DFONT (for Mac users) - as well as TTF. 2x versions are available for HiDPI screens.
For the crispiest viewing experience, try to use the bitmap formats when possible. If bitmap fonts are not supported on your platform (e.g. Windows, VSCode), then use the TTF at font sizes that are multiples of 13px.
Quick Tip: If you need font size in pt, use the following conversion:
pt = px * 72 / dpi
e.g. 13px on a 96dpi screen is
13px * 72 / 96dpi = 9.75pt
.
Requirements:
apt install bdfresize
)apt install fuse
)git clone
and run build.sh
. Font files output to out/
.
build.sh
downloads FontForge as an AppImage at deps/
for generating bitmap
formats from BDF. build.sh
also downloads a Bits'n'Picas binary at deps/
.
If you wish, you can use this binary (instead of or alongside FontForge) to
view glyphs and build desired font formats not found on the Releases page.
A rather gnarly challenge with designing a font this small is that oftentimes, characters have details that are important but difficult to fit within 4px - e.g. the middle part of M/W. Here are some approaches for how I try to resolve these problematic characters:
But this is not a perfect science, and not all characters are salvageable.
In no particular order:
Issues, feature/glyph requests, and pull requests are all welcome!
These are projects that have inspired/helped me create eldur and are 100% worth checking out.
Made with ♥ by Ben Pang. Released under the OFL-1.1 License.