Small displays are affordable and easy to use, but their size can present a challenge. To help address this, [mcer12] created PixelFonts, a family of condensed fonts designed specifically for low-resolution displays, making sure every line holds as much text as it can fit.

PixelFonts works alongside either the AdafruitGFX or U8g2 libraries; one writes to the display using the common syntax of the chosen library, and the font itself comes from PixelFonts. Text can be displayed in regular and 3D shadowed versions, as well as in a wide variety of heights and weights. There’s support for accented letters, albeit only in lowercase due to space constraints. Want to make some changes? Every font comes with a BDF file to make alterations as widely accessible as possible.

Making the most of every pixel is important with small displays, but there’s more than one way to do so. For example, when it comes to color LCDs, subpixel rendering can improve legibility of small fonts; another way to get the most out of limited display sizes.

There are some classic fonts which appeared in one place and became almost iconic, yet never made it into the digital age. The font on the Commodore 64 keyboard for example, with its its slightly narrow letters. If you’ve been yearning to see it again then help is at hand, because [Levente Szabadkai] has traced it from photographs and made it available as a vector font in a variety of formats on GitHub.

As you might expect, it’s an uppercase font only, as the hardware never sported lower case letters. But it doesn’t stop there, because it also contains the various punctuation and other marks, all the PETSCII glyphs, and the function keys. There’s even a Commodore logo for that key down in the left hand corner, but we’re guessing you’ll have to assemble CLR HOME yourself. We can’t help noticing the cursor arrows are solid in contrast to the outlined ones on our 64 here, but we’re guessing there may be some minor differences between models.

So download the font, and make all your stuff look like a 1980s home computer keyboard. And in case you are wondering why you find so many keyboard fonts familiar, we’ve talked about the Gorton font in the past.