A Youthful Folly

John Savard
John Savard Posts: 1,176
in Type Design Critiques
In a sense, this could be considered an attempt at type design on my part.
Basically, given that the 5 by 7 dot matrix was used on many computer peripherals in the 1970s, I decided to play with the possibilities of using it for a wider character set...
The first 512 characters include upper-case, lower-case, small capitals, Greek lower-case, Italics (and APL) and boldface. And many mathemtical and typographical symbols. Even card suits (plus crown and anchor) and astrological symbols.
And then the latter 512 characters... Cyrillic, Arabic, Katakana, Georgian, Armenian, and Hebrew. Among the symbols included are the vowel points for Hebrew, the accents for Vietnamese, and chess diagram characters.

Comments

  • Ori Ben-Dor
    Ori Ben-Dor Posts: 386
    Hebrew looks really cool! I like the nonobvious details. Would be interesting to see how they work in text. 
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,176
    I see I didn't quite count right.
  • K Pease
    K Pease Posts: 182
    I admire the resourcefulness, especially in having no descender space and still choosing to create osf. You might have done well to employ that method to bring more order to the lowercase overall... but to make suggestions about someone else's pixel face is to make one's own.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,176
    edited October 2021
    Oh, I quite agree it is much better to have descender space available. At the time I did this, though, output devices completely lacking in descender space that used the 5 by 7 dot matrix, such as printing terminals, were common. Somewhat later on, printers moved on, and video terminals which used the 5 by 7 dot matrix did typically have descender space of some sort.
    My goal at the time was to show that even in the worst case of a "pure" 5 by 7 dot matrix, the ability existed to support a wide character set, not just the basic 64-character uppercase set.

Categories