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 (U+0041)

  ..XXXX..
  .XX..XX.
  XX....XX
  XX....XX
  XXXXXXXX
  XX....XX
  XX....XX
  ........

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.

Show HN: Sergamon – I defined 3,700 font glyphs as plain-text pixel grids