Hi HN! I built Sergamon because I love classic pixel-art fonts and was mass-frustrated with many missing characters and symbols in existing fonts.
I wanted a font that treats source code as sacred text, without ligatures, without many weights — what you type is what you see, always.
I want to share the result, but also the funny build pipeline I've designed. How it works: Every glyph is a plain-text file with an 8×16 grid of dots and X's — basically ASCII art that compiles into a real font. Example:
A TypeScript pipeline parses these files, runs a greedy rectangle-merging optimizer (to keep vector paths compact), and outputs TTF/WOFF2 via opentype.js.
Design decisions that might be controversial:
- No ligatures, period. This is a philosophical choice. Your code should render exactly as typed. If you want → , type →.
- Single weight. No bold, no light. Like a VT220 terminal — every pixel has the same stroke.
- No anti-aliasing intended. The font is designed for integer scaling with no smoothing. It looks best at 16px multiples.
Some fun challenges along the way:
- Designing confusable pairs (0/O/o, 1/l/I, backtick/quote) to be instantly distinguishable at small sizes within just 8×16 pixels is a surprisingly hard constraint-satisfaction problem.
- Drawing Arabic (254 glyphs with contextual forms) and Devanagari (119 glyphs with combining marks) on a pixel grid meant for Latin was humbling. I have new respect for Unicode.
3,700+ glyphs so far, covering Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Devanagari, Georgian, Armenian, braille, box-drawing, math, and more. OFL-licensed.
Would love feedback and contributions, especially on glyph readability and any scripts/characters I should prioritize next.
Hi HN! I built Sergamon because I love classic pixel-art fonts and was mass-frustrated with many missing characters and symbols in existing fonts. I wanted a font that treats source code as sacred text, without ligatures, without many weights — what you type is what you see, always.
I want to share the result, but also the funny build pipeline I've designed. How it works: Every glyph is a plain-text file with an 8×16 grid of dots and X's — basically ASCII art that compiles into a real font. Example:
A TypeScript pipeline parses these files, runs a greedy rectangle-merging optimizer (to keep vector paths compact), and outputs TTF/WOFF2 via opentype.js.Design decisions that might be controversial:
- No ligatures, period. This is a philosophical choice. Your code should render exactly as typed. If you want → , type →. - Single weight. No bold, no light. Like a VT220 terminal — every pixel has the same stroke. - No anti-aliasing intended. The font is designed for integer scaling with no smoothing. It looks best at 16px multiples.
Some fun challenges along the way:
- Designing confusable pairs (0/O/o, 1/l/I, backtick/quote) to be instantly distinguishable at small sizes within just 8×16 pixels is a surprisingly hard constraint-satisfaction problem. - Drawing Arabic (254 glyphs with contextual forms) and Devanagari (119 glyphs with combining marks) on a pixel grid meant for Latin was humbling. I have new respect for Unicode.
3,700+ glyphs so far, covering Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Devanagari, Georgian, Armenian, braille, box-drawing, math, and more. OFL-licensed.
Would love feedback and contributions, especially on glyph readability and any scripts/characters I should prioritize next.