Cogwheel's CP437 font
Late last century, in a fit of boerdom during high school, I hand-drew a DOS code page 437 font thinking I'd use it in a game. I never got around to making that game, but I did start playing dwarf fortress recently. Not quite happy with any of the tilesets I found, I remembered stumbling across my old font in an archive. It only took a couple seconds to crop the margins and change the colors, and it worked! Not only that, I liked the way it looked.
By sheer coincidence, the 16x18 size I chose at the time is perfect for 16:9 video. Just set your window size to a 2:1 ratio (80x40, 140x70, etc.) and it will fit.
The original font I drew in 1999 with MS Paint on Windows 95.
While I think it aged pretty well overall, there were a few tweaks to make here and there (I've learned a lot about typography and math since then).
- Solid bullets (
\x07and\x08) are now the same size as hollow bullets (\x09and\x0A) - Made
p,q,b,dmore consistent with themselves and the rest of the letters. - Moved underscore (
_) up a pixel to make it visible within a block of background color - Vertically centered the horizontal line-drawing components; single-line pieces line up with the gap between double-line pieces
- Cleaned up some math and greek symbols
Added a bit of rounding to the line drawing characters.
Reduced the size of ., ,, ', `, and \xFA to make things stand out from the background more in Dwarf Fortress.
| cogp437_v2_rounded_small_dots samples |
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These files are released under the CC0 license. See LICENSE for details.