DSE Typewriter

https://webonastick.com/fonts/dse-typewriter/

A project to create a coding font inspired by early 20th-century typewriters.

And to practice editing fonts directly in FontForge.

You might actually like Old Timey Mono better. I do.

https://webonastick.com/fonts/old-timey-mono/

About DSE Typewriter

This font is not the result of any scans or traces of samples, specimens, or other output from an actual typewriter. I personally eyeballed and drew everything in FontForge.

DSE Typewriter is more like an amalgamation of old-school typewriter fonts with features semi-arbitrarily picked from each one, as well as a few coding-friendly features that were not in use on actual typewriters of the period.

Though this is intended to be useful as a coding font, I emphasized on aesthetics while maintaining some degree of readability. There is room for improvement.

Features and Characteristics

• Relatively low ex-height.

• Lining numerals, i.e., all start at the baseline and end at the same height.

• Full ASCII and Latin-1 coverage, along with selected extended Latin, punctuation, graphic, and currency symbols.

  Includes every character you can type in the US International Layout in Windows.

  Includes every character you can type on a Mac when the input source is U.S.

  Includes all box drawing characters.

  Supports most western European languages.

  Includes basic Cyrillic.

• Coding-friendly distinctive characters: li1| Oo0 `'"

• Elite scale typeface (12 characters per inch at 12-point font size).

• Perfectly useful as a traditional typewriter face for other purposes, if you don’t mind the zero (0) having a dot in the middle.

Caveats and Answers to Questions You Might Ask

• There aren't any hints, so on certain platforms, this font may not be readable at lower font sizes. Auto-hints seem to work okay-ish in Windows Google Chrome.

  Chances are, at any particular point in time, my brain is too mush to learn how to do those.

• This is most definitely a work in progress.

Variants

• dse-typewriter-font.ttf is the base variant.

• dse-typewriter-font-lh.ttf adds metrics based on a 1.2-em line height.

See Also

See https://github.com/dse/dse-typewriter-bitmap-font/ for DSE Typewriter Bitmap, a couple bitmap fonts I created long ago. They also have coding-friendly features, but only cover ASCII and Latin-1. There is a .bdf version for use in the X Window System and other environments that support it, and there is a .ttf version.

License

SIL OFL 1.1

Bug fixes?

Open an issue in Github or email me. Either way is fine.

Shoutouts, Thanks, etc.

• Guy Ollerearnshaw, for pointing out a bug in U+2567.

Preview