Hawker News

A font recreated from photographs of classic Commodore 64 keycaps

github.com/szabadkai

406 pointsby sohkamyung68 comments

jankhg[8 comments hidden]
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

mxfh[hidden]
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...
abrookewood[3 comments hidden]
Very cool! Hope you like this one ... about a font carved into a tree!!

https://bjoernkarmann.dk/project/occlution_grotesque

Forgeties79[hidden]
That’s really neat. Interesting watching them grow sideways
jankhg[hidden]
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.
mock-possum[hidden]
Thanks for sharing, wonderful article! Makes me wonder what using a bitmap Gorton in terminal would feel like… maybe I’ll try it today.
gxs[hidden]
Thank you! Great article, better than the actual submission I came for, super interesting and a pleasure to read
conkeisterdoor[hidden]
So THAT's what that font is called! I love this typeface and always wondered about its name. What a treat to learn so much about its history!
tniemi[4 comments hidden]
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[2 comments hidden]
Perhaps best known for being the basis for Eurostile, a staple of SF movie typography.
queenkjuul[hidden]
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[hidden]
The PET models used this as well.
bay_baobab_ii[6 comments hidden]
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[5 comments hidden]
Plus one for having all the keys in the correct locations!

How does it feel and sound?

whilenot-dev[hidden]
Had one too, it's rather on the loud side of clicking and the build quality is great.
yifanl[hidden]
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[hidden]
Plus one for having all the keys in the correct locations!

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

HeckinCoolDude[hidden]
They’re all wrong, F-keys should be on the right, there should only be two cursor keys, this is a Commodore themed bog standard PC keyboard.
petecooper[8 comments hidden]
>https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/issues/4

This saddens me, frankly.

dylan604[hidden]
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?
BearOso[4 comments hidden]
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[3 comments hidden]
>It's really obvious.

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

ryandrake[2 comments hidden]
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[hidden]
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[hidden]
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[hidden]
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.

otikik[2 comments hidden]
"!" is like half of the size of "?". Even if that's faithful to the keyboard, it is very annoying.
BearOso[hidden]
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.

gwbas1c[hidden]
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)

Oarch[5 comments hidden]
Oh gosh, this is really rather nice.
Loughla[hidden]
It really is though. Very clean.
unD[2 comments hidden]
I haven't read "Press play on tape" in decades!
Sharlin[hidden]
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/
epcoa[hidden]
More AI slop.
dar5hak[hidden]
If creatively expanded to more characters, this would make a pretty nice coding font.
pinkmuffinere[hidden]
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

zooweemama[5 comments hidden]
We need one for the ZX Spectrum too!
stevekemp[3 comments hidden]
You can find a Speccy font here:

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

zooweemama[2 comments hidden]
Thank you! I was meaning a font created from photos of the Spectrum rubber keys, as in the OP
TechnicianTed[hidden]
The closest matches seem to be Helvetica Bold (CSS weight 700) for the main letter and Helvetica Demi-Bold (600) for the symbols and keywords but some symbols like @ # and ~ are slightly different.
wolvoleo[hidden]
And the Atari XL
petesergeant[4 comments hidden]
The download links seem broken, does anyone have the TTF?
Tomrn[hidden]
https://github.com/szabadkai/c64-keyboard-font/tree/main/fon...
dekoruotas[hidden]
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[hidden]
I removed the querystring ?raw=true on the download link, and then clicked "view raw" and that worked.
orbital-decay[2 comments hidden]
But what font did the C64 keyboard originally use?
nathell[hidden]
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
queenkjuul[hidden]
This is sweet but i could really live without the Claude commentary in the preview page
Sharlin[4 comments hidden]
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.
mxfh[hidden]
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.
judetechdevs[hidden]
It looks too nice to have been drawn just for keycaps :(
urbnspacecowboy[hidden]
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.

exitb[2 comments hidden]
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[hidden]
Same, the old one somehow looks newer lol
sombragris[hidden]
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.

mark-r[hidden]
What, no Euro key?

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

crustyoldhuman[hidden]
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

exceptione[hidden]
A weird thing: the exclamation mark `!` seems to be elevated from the baseline, judging from the specimen.
amai[hidden]
No umlauts?
appstorelottery[hidden]
Very nice - thank you!
amelius[hidden]
Apple ][ please.

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

cringleycringe[hidden]
I love AI!