A decolike pixel font made for friends at Marinan Research Division.

It reminds me of the fonts used by old cellphones, except bigger and with more line width variation.

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Original size: 8.25pt

Original size: 15pt

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A font which has a spurless, sans-serif, pixelated polygonal look which is somewhat reminescent of fonts used in VHS technology.

A lot of applied science has gone and continues to go into this design. It's designed to remain legible on all media in all use conditions, provided that one uses the original size or a multiple thereof. Numerous technologies and mediums are being employed to realize this objective.

"Diaspora" is now being tested and refined for use with/on/against:
     • CRT, LCD & e-Ink screens
     • image formats & compressed imagery (GIF, JPG)
     • printers (inkjet, bubble jet, laserjet, & thermal)
     • analog video & multi-generational copies (VHS, Super 8)
     • digital video (AVI, MP4, MPEG, WEBM, WMV)
     • 3D and voxel models (Blender, MagicaVoxel, POV-Ray)
     • dynamic scaling hardware (game consoles and capture devices)
     • imagery plugins & filters, including image degraders
     • image scaling/interpolation hardware & software
     • image recognition hardware & software

These all have traits which degrade, distort, compress, glitch, or otherwise alter imagery in various ways. This design aims to minimize the loss of legibility from these effects and to attain the best scores possible in various forms of imagery analysis. So far, this has proved extremely useful, as it can remain fully legible even when extreme JPG or video compression are applied to it thousands of times.

A piece software I helped write, called the Marinan Imagery Deconstruction AI System (MIDAS), is being used on captured images of this font. The end objective is to realize the design which has the best all-around Marinan Interpretability Value (MIV) for all the tested platforms - the design which is considered by MIDAS to be the most legible in the most media under the broadest range of use conditions and quality levels.

MIDAS uses a set of considerations made with both humans and computers in mind, so a high MIV does not necessarily equal a better font - it just means one that the system thinks is easier to visually interpret. Note the use of the phrase "visually interpret" as opposed to "read". MIDAS tries to determine how well people and computers can tell what shapes are, not how much enjoyment they'll get from reading or how much strain they might undergo while doing it.

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VERSION HISTORY:

1.0.0 - initial release.

1.0.1 - More Latin support added.

1.0.2 - First batch of tests run.

1.0.3 - gjy5&ßẞ were improved, some glyphs added.

1.0.4 - Second batch of tests run. Space width reduced.

1.0.5 - Experimentally converted to a rounded spurless design, then converted back to a plain spurless after testing. A few new ligatures were added.

1.0.6 - Cyrillic and Greek enter development. Many of these letters must be altered to be distinct from their Latin counterparts.

1.0.7 - Some spacing values changed to increase internal consistency. More difficult tests are being devised. However, since only I seem interested in this type of work, this project is going on hiatus for some time.

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See also: AMFA, a font built with similar considerations in mind

Version 1.4: All permutations of e, G and K were refined and improved. Added Coptic and Cyrillic. Completed most of Extended Latin B.

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A modernized, rounded, and truncated version of Marengi. This is made to be a good text editor/chat font. It has very few kerning pairs, so it should render fine in any software.

Ascenders are only allowed to be as tall as the uppercase/numerals, while descenders are allowed to go 2px below the line. This creates a natural line spacing that is readable and not too dense. (Diacritics break this rule, of course... darn them...)

Gone are the curved descenders/termini on letters like gjty. The simpler geometry makes this design more suited to speedreading than its predecessor. In fact, altering those four letters alone improves speedreading on this font by up to 14%!

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MIV: 8.25

Original size: 6pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)

A terminal font used in several of my own games. Think of it as my own replacement font for a DOS prompt. It is meant for all-uppercase terminal use and does not have extended language support.

This design has been further refined since its initial Fontstruction. I have improved its aesthetics as well as its visual interpretability using Marinanian methods. This is still a design with more functionality than aesthetic appeal, though.

Original size: 3.75pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

See also:Amalgarmada, Amalgarmada 2

The main font used by MARENGI Omnisystems in my video game series, "Endless Sea Of Stars". These letterforms can be found engraved into or projected onto practically every piece of MO technology. This script was designed in 2011 to be suitable for printing, logo design, art, and many other purposes. It lacks the constant height which most of my other pixel fonts have, but makes up for it with its bookish appearance.

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Versioning:

2.6 (19Aug2018) - "bdďđ" were perfected. Space width reduced.

2.5 (20Jul2018) - "IÌÍÎÏø" were perfected and massive kerning work began.

2.4 (15Jul2018) - "J" was perfected and several letterwidths were altered.

2.3 (18May2018) - "hnru34679ÀÁÂÃÅÈÉÊÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕØÙÚÛÝÞßàáâãåæçèéêìíîïñòóôõøùúûý" were perfected.

2.2 (17May2018) - ":;gjty%/\ÂÆÊÎÔÛâæêîôû¼½¾" were edited for more consistency and readability.

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MIV: 8.74

Original size: 11pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

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Official font of AMFA (formerly ATMA), the main rival of MARENGI Omnisystems in Endless Sea Of Stars. Appears throughout my games (especially those using the ESOS and ESOS-Lite engines) and is used as the main font of ESOS Terminal A (the one doing the super-long survey).

Between 2012 and 2014, ESOS Journey-Depth AI entities collaborated to produce this specific arrangement of pixels as the most legible form of 1px wide, monochrome 8x8 Latin for electro-optical systems (Marinan Interpretability Value 9.29).

This font is useful if you want to write some really efficient text recognition software for a robot with a camera, or if you want a pixel font which elicits a high degree of reading accuracy. Some would argue that the uppercase makes it less readable, but you'll be hard pressed to find another font that is THIS readable in uppercase only!

I designed this 16x16 pixel font to facilitate texturing and dithering for pixel artists. Not every piece of art software has tools designed for texturing/dithering, and loading lots of custom brushes for the purpose can slow one's software way down as well. This font was made to attempt to solve these problems. Now you can dither, shade, and texture by typing! Every glyph repeats as a seamless texture both horizontally and vertically.

The name comes from my emulator/game, "Virtua Gremlin". Although these patterns weren't in the game (it used 9x9 tiles, not 16x16), many of the patterns here are based on that earlier work. "Skins" is a reference to graphical skins, of course. :D

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USAGE GUIDE

A-Z = textures

a-z = dithering/shading patterns

0-9 = scanlines

The rest is sort of a mishmash... I'll organize it better once I have enough glyphs to warrant a good classification system...

Have an idea for a pattern? Want to see a particular sprite or aesthetic included? Let me know :D

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Original size: 12pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)

Tip: View this in the Character Map so you can more easily grab and paste glyphs when designing!

See also: Gremlin Skins HD