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A font recreated from photographs of classic Commodore 64 keycaps

364 points by sohkamyung 14 hours ago | 62 comments

jankhg 12 hours ago

This reminds me of this beautifully written article about the font Gorton.

https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49201953

abrookewood 11 hours ago

Very cool! Hope you like this one ... about a font carved into a tree!!

https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/occlution_grotesque

jankhg 6 hours ago

Wow, I like the idea and how this was used as a photography arts project. Also, I think this idea could be transferred to other materials, such as iron, or ice.

Forgeties79 9 hours ago

That’s really neat. Interesting watching them grow sideways

mxfh 12 hours ago

in the further reading there is also a list with a number of recreations of related digitzed routed fonts: https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/r...

gxs 7 hours ago

Thank you! Great article, better than the actual submission I came for, super interesting and a pleasure to read

mock-possum 7 hours ago

Thanks for sharing, wonderful article! Makes me wonder what using a bitmap Gorton in terminal would feel like… maybe I’ll try it today.

pinkmuffinere 14 minutes ago

These are absolutely beautiful! However, I think I often feel that when looking at fonts somebody has shared online, which makes me wonder how much I love the font, vs how much I just like the design aesthetic of people that craft fonts.

Also I understand why only the uppercase version is given, but it does pretty much preclude me from using the font, since 95% of the letters I type are lowercase

tniemi 11 hours ago

The old versions of VIC-20 used a font called Microgramma.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1pjw7q6/t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgramma_(typeface)

Sharlin 10 hours ago

Perhaps best known for being the basis for Eurostile, a staple of SF movie typography.

queenkjuul 7 hours ago

Microgramma and Eurostile are all time classics. I have so many old electronics that used them on the control panels.

There's an open source font QTEurotype that does an excellent approximation that I've been using in a recent project

badc0ffee 7 hours ago

The PET models used this as well.

bay_baobab_ii 6 hours ago

8BitDo made a modern mechanical keyboard that looks like a C64. I got one and I am loving it. https://www.8bitdo.com/retro-mechanical-keyboard-c64/

stronglikedan 4 hours ago

Plus one for having all the keys in the correct locations!

How does it feel and sound?

yifanl 2 hours ago

It's quite hollow and plasticky on the inside. This is not a bad thing nor a mark of cheapness, but it sounds very roomy and echo-y for a keyboard, so if you like the sound of the clacking on a keyboard, it's quite amplified by the board.

I wasn't around to use an actual C64 to compare the sound against that, but I suspect it's an intentional choice as a retro keyboard to mark itself apart from the foamy modern keyboards that tend to dampen the keyboard.

reaperducer 23 minutes ago

Plus one for having all the keys in the correct locations!

There's nothing correct about a "WIN" key.

whilenot-dev 3 hours ago

Had one too, it's rather on the loud side of clicking and the build quality is great.

petecooper 10 hours ago

>https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/issues/4

This saddens me, frankly.

BearOso 9 hours ago

The S is misproportioned. M should have the middle go all the way to the baseline. The middle stems on 3 and 4 are too long and too short. The punctuation is all different sizes. This is just me glancing at the normalized comparison image. It's really obvious.

petecooper 8 hours ago

>It's really obvious.

I'm not disputing that -- the approach of the issue OP was what irked me.

ryandrake 5 hours ago

Yea, it's as if the OP went out of his way to make the feedback both insulting and non-constructive / unhelpful.

Imagine being at work in a professional job and filing a bug like that to a coworker. Totally inappropriate.

cmrdporcupine 3 hours ago

Some people get this way the moment they get a whiff you've touched an LLM. Like, beyond rude.

Frankly, it's usually just gatekeeping (or just being threatened) hiding behind some moral system they just assume you should share with them.

kalleboo 8 hours ago

It's an asshole issue, but at the same time the AI that did the work isn't going to have it's feelings hurt.

ricardobeat 6 hours ago

What a confused comment.

"There is no RETURN, SHIFT...", "Too many F keys". They are confusing a typeface with trying to replicate the keyboard keys.

The arrows are not the cursor keys, but based on the ESC key.

They are right about the @ character though, it looks quite wonky.

dylan604 9 hours ago

Why would keys with full words like shift/return/etc be useful in creating a font. Basic comprehension skills are at a loss for this user. The issue comment should have ended with the first sentence. However, could the keys with full words have been used to provide clues on kerning or other spacing to use when building the font?

Oarch 12 hours ago

Oh gosh, this is really rather nice.

unD 11 hours ago

I haven't read "Press play on tape" in decades!

Sharlin 10 hours ago

There was a band named PRESS PLAY ON TAPE (stylized in all caps, of course) playing SID covers and similar stuff that I saw performing a couple of times back in the 00s/10s. Actually, looks like they’re still active at least to some extent: https://pressplayontape.com/

Loughla 12 hours ago

It really is though. Very clean.

epcoa 9 hours ago

More AI slop.

dar5hak 9 hours ago

If creatively expanded to more characters, this would make a pretty nice coding font.

gwbas1c 10 hours ago

The special characters / punctuation are not aligned. The !#$% characters either float too high or need to be a little bigger.

(Yes, I copied the image from the page into Paint and drew a line)

sombragris 5 hours ago

Looks nice. The C-64 had an excellent keyboard typeface

I think peak keycaps font were the ones used in the Epson QX-10, Epson HX-20, Tandy 100, and the common C-64.

zooweemama 13 hours ago

We need one for the ZX Spectrum too!

stevekemp 8 hours ago

You can find a Speccy font here:

https://www.dafont.com/zx-spectrum.font

orbital-decay 11 hours ago

But what font did the C64 keyboard originally use?

nathell 9 hours ago

Dunno about the original C64 (which is what this attempts to recreate), but the C64C used ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro Book according to https://github.com/FeralChild64/MechBoard64-keycaps

crustyoldhuman 7 hours ago

thank you so much for this! love how this looks, it's such a clean typeface

EDIT: I kept getting problems downloading it--errors acting like nothing was there. After clicking around on the download links a few times, it eventually made it to my downloads and I got the file. Not sure what's going on there, but just a heads up for anyone else

exitb 12 hours ago

Nice. It never really occurred to me how different these are from 64C keycaps. I guess through our affinity for retro look, the original typeface ended up feeling more modern/current than the newer one.

judetechdevs 12 hours ago

Same, the old one somehow looks newer lol

mark-r 11 hours ago

What, no Euro key?

(Yes, I realize the € symbol didn't exist until 1996)

Sharlin 13 hours ago

It’s a very pleasant looking humanist sans. Now I’m wondering about the story of the original typeface – were the glyphs specifically designed for the keyboard? Seems more likely that some existing font was used.

urbnspacecowboy 6 hours ago

Good question! I've looked into this a bit myself and I think the best overall match is Akzidenz-Grotesk Condensed, albeit not exact: https://www.myfonts.com/products/condensed-regular-akzidenz-...

The G is different (look at the lower right corner), the 0 (zero) has a slash which looks custom, and the Q is very different (it looks like a letter O with a piece of another O added for the tail).

And yes, since it's the standard comment about fonts, this is a commercial font that costs an arm and a leg.

judetechdevs 12 hours ago

It looks too nice to have been drawn just for keycaps :(

mxfh 12 hours ago

Kind of ambivalent state of things, a research thread to solve that provenance issue to some degree of certainty is always only one prompt away too.

otikik 9 hours ago

"!" is like half of the size of "?". Even if that's faithful to the keyboard, it is very annoying.

BearOso 9 hours ago

It's not faithful. The AI took the original image and assumed the ! was supposed to be elevated like that. This project is low-effort AI generated.

Edit to add: This GitHub user has a over a hundred repositories full of random slop. It's clearly being used to generate activity for a resume or something.

exceptione 10 hours ago

A weird thing: the exclamation mark `!` seems to be elevated from the baseline, judging from the specimen.

petesergeant 13 hours ago

The download links seem broken, does anyone have the TTF?

Tomrn 13 hours ago

https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/tree/main/fon...

dekoruotas 10 hours ago

Readme links to: https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/blob/main/fon... Instead, it should be linked to: https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/raw/refs/head...

leptons 5 hours ago

I removed the querystring ?raw=true on the download link, and then clicked "view raw" and that worked.

_joel 13 hours ago

[flagged]

keyle 12 hours ago

Completely useless comment thank you. And the link is broken in the repo.

nar001 12 hours ago

I'm confused, what do you mean? It seems to be in the git repo as it should be? https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/tree/main/fon...

_joel 10 hours ago

The readme is just a text file, the files are there, it doesn't take a genius to find them.

"How do I download the TTF". Well, use your brain.

madaxe_again 12 hours ago

That isn’t the repo. That’s a readme. It’s there in the repo, it’s just fine.

bodge5000 12 hours ago

To be fair they are correct, there's a "Download TTF" which seems to be at least partially broken (cmd-click works fine, but just clicking it takes you to an error page), but you are right, the files are there in the repo and download fine.

The readme isn't the first place I'd look for a download link either, but it is there

cringleycringe 10 hours ago

I love AI!

queenkjuul 7 hours ago

This is sweet but i could really live without the Claude commentary in the preview page

amai 11 hours ago

No umlauts?

appstorelottery 11 hours ago

Very nice - thank you!

amelius 11 hours ago

Apple ][ please.

(Actually, I think the Commodore had a better font)

hackerbluedev 5 hours ago

[flagged]

taylormichelleb 7 hours ago

[dead]