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Hershey fonts[0] look a bit odd on high-res pixel screens, but one might be able to cope with that by carefully selecting sizes and fudging with the definitions. Definitely low-code.

And once upon a time, X11 had another weird little format besides PS and TTF fonts, namely "Speedo" fonts[1]. Also used in plenty of other software, as PS/TTF weren't that common and it was made by Bitstream, one of the major font foundry (because no font format helps if there are no legal fonts available for it).

Alas, both not really in use these days.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitstream_Speedo_Fonts

Note that Hershey's (physical!) pens were about 3 times as large as his coordinate system; rendering them with a suitable thickness gives me reasonable results even at higher resolutions.

(like with the pixel grill on CRTs, often older digital formats were subject to some sort of analogue low-pass filtering before being perceived)

I found this reference for Hershey Vector font

https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/hershey/

It seems to describe a "pen" which draws the character. It is indeed pretty cool!

I haven't looked deeply yet, thanks for the resources!

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