eightbit-atari-fonts's Introduction

Eightbit-Atari-Fonts

Fonts generated from original bitmaps from Atari 8-Bit computers.

Created by very very talented people many many years ago. Ripped by hackers lost to the mists of time. Collected by archivists for future generations.

Recoil was used to convert to PNG. ImageMagick took the PNG and reversed, resized, chopped up and output PNM files which Potrace then converted into SVG which was fed into FontForge and output as modern fonts using some Python 2.7 written by me as the software glue that is holding it all together.

All of these fonts are called 'Eightbit Atari'. Each one has a different weight name so they won't clutter up your font list but you still probably don't want to install a few hundred weights for a single font. EightBit Atari-Regular is the 'real' Atari font.

The starter font for all of these is based upon the hard work of Mark Simonson. The terms of the licence he has released his Atari font under allows no modification so I had to recreate all the glyphs he drew for myself, but I have kept the layout from his font the same, the standard character set is at ASCII+0xE00, the European character set is at ASCII+$E100 and now also the Arabic character set is at ASCII+$E200. I have also mapped all the European and Graphics characters to their closest UTF-8 equivalents. I've had a go at mapping Arabic and adding Hebrew but I'd appreciate corrections.

If you like these and want more but with better curation, Damien Guard has a collection of bitmapped fonts in various formats that he created by hand on his ZX Origins website, check them out!