pxl2000 font, release 0.95
Florian Cramer
1. Description
pxl2000 is a free ISO 8859-15 (i.e. ISO 8859-1 with Euro
symbol) encoded monowidth dot matrix typeface for the X Win-
dow system (X11). It is currently available in nine sizes:
4x8, 5x10, 6x12, 7x14, 8x16, 9x18, 10x20, 11x22 and 12x24
pixels.
2. Design objectives
o Readability; fitness to be used as a default screen font,
especially on reverse-color X11 terminals
o Optimization for program code through visually distinct
characters L, l, 1, 7, |, I, i and 0, O, , o, .
o Complete ISO 8859-15 character set.
o Many point sizes to ensure optical consistency across dif-
ferent computers with different screen resolutions (encom-
passing anything from PDA displays to 20" screens).
o Fitness for displaying ASCII art and codework/code poetry,
from viewing graphics in aview, watching TV in ttv and
DVDs in mplayer with "-vo aa" to reading mailinglists like
_arc.hive_, 7-11 and wryting in mutt.
o Clean, minimalist visual design; no serifs, a square
minuscle base matrix, rounded edges. This is a computer
terminal font; it should not look like a low-res imitation
of print type.
The author employs this font in his "anti-desktop"
setup consisting of the ratpoison window manager and GNU
screen inside an rxvt (with reverse color and no scroll-
bars), similar to what is described in .
3. Number of characters per line
The following table shows the number of characters per line
each font size allows at typical screen resolutions:
-2-
+----------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+
| | 4x8 | 5x10 | 6x12 | 7x14 | 8x16 | 9x18 | 10x20 | 11x22 | 12x24 |
+----------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+
|320x240 | 80 | 64 | 53 | 45 | 40 | 35 | 32 | 29 | 26 |
+----------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+
|640x480 | 160 | 128 | 106 | 91 | 80 | 71 | 64 | 58 | 53 |
+----------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+
|800x600 | 200 | 160 | 133 | 114 | 100 | 88 | 80 | 72 | 66 |
+----------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+
|1024x768 | 256 | 204 | 170 | 146 | 128 | 113 | 102 | 91 | 85 |
+----------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+
|1280x960 | 320 | 256 | 213 | 182 | 160 | 142 | 128 | 116 | 106 |
+----------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+
|1600x1200 | 400 | 320 | 266 | 228 | 200 | 177 | 160 | 145 | 133 |
+----------+-----+------+------+------+------+------+-------+-------+-------+
4. Screenshots
5. Download
6. Etymology
The name of this typeface relates to the 1980s Fisher-Price
PXL2000 toy video system which recorded low-resolution black
and white video on standard audio cassette tapes. PXL2000
technology was, for a long time, popular among video experi-
mentalists (see ).
-3-
7. Installation
Installation and usage instructions are provided in the file
INSTALL.
8. Copyleft
Copyright 2002, 2003 Florian Cramer, cantsin@zedat.fu-
berlin.de
This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU
General Public license, see accompanying file COPYING for
details.
9. Thanks/Acknowdlegements
Mark Leisher for xmbdfed, George Williams for pfaedit,
Hiroto Kagotani for bdfresize, Keith Packard for bdftopcf