VGA character. Every pixel deliberate. PCFontBI extends VileR’s (int10h.org) excellent preservation of classic PC fonts. We keep the IBM VGA 8×16 raster from VGA8.F16 in VileR’s font archive pixel-for-pixel in Regular, then add Bold and Italic faces, Nerd Font glyph coverage and programming ligatures. See VileR’s Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack for the wider preservation project.
PCFontBI is a standalone, four-face 8×16 monospaced font family: Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic. Use it anywhere you can select an installed font, including terminals, editors and IDEs. v0.4.0 adds pixel icons and programming ligatures to the native one-bit grid.
| Face | Construction |
|---|---|
| Regular | Original IBM VGA 8×16 ROM pixels, unchanged. |
| Bold | Selected whole-pixel weight additions, protected counters, opened M/W joins. |
| Italic | Explicit ASCII bitmap masters, a two-pixel staircase, redrawn lowercase and a single-storey a. |
| Bold Italic | Weight applied to the italic bitmap, with separate M/W corrections. |
The 95 printable ASCII characters in each styled face have editable masters in design/strikes.json. They were seeded from the ROM, then curated; the italic lowercase was redrawn. Other CP437 characters use conservative fallback styling and are not individually authored. Regular remains the fidelity reference.
Every face has the same 8×16 cell and 933 Unicode codepoints: CP437, complete Block Elements and Braille ranges, four Powerline separators, punctuation aliases and common Nerd Font icons. Box drawing, blocks, Braille and Powerline stay identical across styles. Letters and digits keep a one-pixel right gutter. The original full-width VGA symbols retain their width.
The family comes in two forms:
- TTF: square, axis-aligned outlines around the pixel shapes; easy to install in modern terminals.
- BDF: genuine one-bit 16px bitmap strikes; useful for inspection and bitmap-capable applications.
Install the TTFs like any other font and select PCFontBI in the application. The core family works on its own; it includes the original VGA repertoire and the curated modern icons. For full Nerd Font private-use coverage, install the separate PCFontBI Symbols companion too. On Linux, the installer below adds a Fontconfig fallback rule scoped to PCFontBI; other systems and apps may require you to install or select the companion as a fallback themselves. The companion is optional and is not a prerequisite for using PCFontBI as a font.
The old aspect-compressed and antialiased designs remain in Git history. v0.3 uses the new PCFontBI family name and filenames, so it can coexist with the earlier IBM VGA 8x16 TUI family. The cell is now 8px wide at a 16px em, up from 6.625px; this deliberately trades some horizontal density for exact pixels.
99 original bitmap icons cover 384 Nerd Font mappings in each core face: files, folders, Git, status, hardware and language symbols. One mapping overlaps the original VGA heart; its original pixels take priority. Icons stay upright and unchanged in all styles.
The separate PCFontBI Symbols companion supplies the full 10,617 distinct named codepoints from Nerd Fonts 3.5.1. Its artwork is automatically fitted to a one-bit 8×16 grid, with four matching styles in one .ttc file. It is not individually hand-drawn: dense logos necessarily lose detail. Install both parts for full coverage. This is an independent Nerd Font-compatible package, not an official patched Nerd Fonts release.
29 programming sequences use OpenType calt contextual alternates. Every input character keeps one glyph, its cluster and one cell of advance; joined drawings do not change the text or collapse cursor positions. Disable calt to see the literal operators. Feature notes list the supported sequences and installation details.
Stock Foot does not support programming ligatures across characters. It displays the original operators and supports the icons through Fontconfig fallback. Ligatures work in shaping-capable applications such as Kitty and Ghostty when calt is enabled. In Ghostty, font-feature = -calt disables them; Kitty also offers font_features and disable_ligatures controls. These application paths have not been tested on the user's display.
BDF contains the core icons but cannot carry OpenType shaping. Use TTF for the ligatures; the full symbol repertoire is in the TTC companion.
On Linux with Fontconfig, install the core family and optional full symbol companion for your user:
./install.sh
fc-match PCFontBIThis installs four core TTFs, the four-style Symbols TTC and a per-user Fontconfig fallback rule. It does not change application settings or install the BDFs. Built files are in fonts/. You can also install the four PCFontBI-*.ttf files with your operating system's normal font installer; select PCFontBI in your app as you would any other monospaced font. Install PCFontBI-Symbols.ttc as well when you need the full Nerd Font repertoire. BDF files are for applications that explicitly support bitmap fonts.
PCFontBI is the font; Foot is one optional place to use it. Any application that can select an installed monospaced font can use the four core faces. The matching symbol companion supplies fallback icons when the application honors Fontconfig or lets you configure fallback fonts. Ligatures require an application with OpenType contextual shaping enabled. See feature notes for coverage and application behavior.
For Foot, use a 16 physical-pixel em, or an integer multiple such as 32px. This fragment configures only the font faces; it does not enable programming ligatures, which Foot does not shape across characters:
font=PCFontBI:pixelsize=16:antialias=false:hinting=false
font-bold=PCFontBI:style=Bold:pixelsize=16:antialias=false:hinting=false
font-italic=PCFontBI:style=Italic:pixelsize=16:antialias=false:hinting=false
font-bold-italic=PCFontBI:style=Bold Italic:pixelsize=16:antialias=false:hinting=falsepixelsize avoids point-to-pixel DPI conversion. Foot's DPI/scaling settings and compositor scaling still matter: the final raster should land on the physical display grid. With dpi-aware=yes, Foot documents that an explicit pixelsize is used as-is; other scaling paths can multiply it. Inspect a screenshot at 100% rather than assuming the requested size is the final size.
The per-font antialias=false requests whole-pixel rendering; hinting=false avoids moving the authored grid. This also avoids deliberately applying RGB/WRGB smoothing to these glyphs in renderers that honor the setting. These are settings to test in your Foot build, not a claim that its custom WRGB path has been verified.
See the Foot configuration manual and Fontconfig properties.
Kitty and Ghostty can shape the included programming ligatures when calt is enabled. Configuration differs by application; the linked feature notes describe the known support. The font files do not require Foot or any particular terminal.
The native design is 16px, with clean integer enlargement to 32px, 48px, and so on at an integer pixel origin. A 20px or 24px raster does not map each design pixel to a whole screen pixel: antialiasing can soften it, while monochrome rounding can distort it. A future 20px strike should be designed at 20px. The TTFs deliberately contain no autohinting or size-specific hint programs.
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
make allThis builds four core TTFs, four core BDFs and the Symbols TTC, runs the tests, and produces the family specimen, feature specimen and glyph atlas below. Open images at 100% to avoid viewer resampling.
The atlas shows the reviewed glyphs across all four faces. The feature specimen compares literal operators with their contextual forms and previews the authored icon set; the family specimen shows the four faces in text and terminal-style samples.
The tests check all 933 core codepoints in every face through grayscale FreeType/Pillow rendering:
- No intermediate gray pixels at 16px, and exact doubled rasters at 32px.
- Pixel-for-pixel ROM fidelity in Regular and exact ASCII-master reproduction in the styles.
- TTF/BDF raster parity, cell bounds, grid alignment, spacing and style metadata.
- Structural glyph identity, representative counter preservation and distinct confusable characters.
- Real HarfBuzz shaping of all 29 sequences in all styles, feature-off behavior, complete operator-run boundaries and exact raster output.
- Every companion codepoint at 16px and 32px, nonblank coverage (except the intentional
nf-cod-blank), style identity and Fontconfig fallback.
In the checked native-size phrase, Bold adds about 15.6% ink over Regular; Bold Italic adds about 18.6% over Italic. These are weight measurements, not readability scores. The specimens were visually inspected on dark and light backgrounds; the target OLED and custom Foot renderer still need local review.
Design notes explain the choices. ROADMAP.md tracks remaining work.
The base raster is VileR's VGA8.F16 dump of IBM's VGA 8×16 character set. Credit and the existing CC BY-SA 4.0 terms are preserved in ATTRIBUTION.md and LICENSE. PCFontBI is an independent derivative, not an IBM product.
The Symbols companion retains its source icon-set licenses separately; see its provenance. It is not relicensed under the core family’s CC BY-SA terms.