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Tiny5 Mono is the monospaced member of the Tiny5 family, a compact 5-pixel variable font that captures the essence of 1980s–90s digital minimalism. It brings the clarity and charm of Tiny5 to code editors, terminals and text-mode interfaces. Its box-drawing and block characters fill the whole cell, so frames and sextant graphics join seamlessly.
Like those of the text modes of 1980s terminals and PCs, its pixels are taller than they are wide. Lines of code stay compact, while the letterforms keep all the legibility of Tiny5.
Like Tiny5, it features six variable axes — Weight, Width, Italic, Roundness, Bleed and Jitter. Weight matches the stroke to your color theme, Width trades columns for breathing room, and Roundness, Bleed and Jitter take its look from crisp geometric shapes and sharp LCD edges to the soft glow of CRT monitors and the subtle ink spread of dot-matrix printers. Besides Regular, Medium, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic, the static fonts come in LCD, CRT and Matrix styles.
Tiny5 Mono shares its design with Tiny5 and Tiny5 Duo. Where Tiny5 sets text proportionally with one-pixel strokes, and Tiny5 Duo doubles its stems for bolder emphasis, Tiny5 Mono widens its narrow letters to a fixed 5-pixel width, in a cell six pixels wide and nine tall.
Tiny5 Mono excels at evoking retro-futurism, constrained-tech nostalgia and clean minimalism. It's especially well-suited for:
- Code editors, terminals and consoles
- Text-mode interfaces, ASCII and ANSI art
- Embedded systems, firmware and device displays
- Debug overlays and HUDs in pixel art and lo-fi games
It shares the broad language support of Tiny5, covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Armenian scripts across 974 languages, and adds complete sets of box-drawing characters and block elements, plus the sextants and much of Symbols for Legacy Computing, for a total of 4,957 glyphs. It also has small caps for Latin and Cyrillic.
For crisp rows of pixels, set the font size to increments of 6 pt (8 px). To make the pixels square, set the Width axis to 143.82.
Tiny5 Mono is also available in BDF format for seamless integration with the mcu-renderer, u8g2 and TFT_eSPI libraries.
Stefan Schmidt is an electrical engineer with graduate studies in signal processing, multimodal artistic languages and sociology. Fascinated by the interplay between the virtual and the real, his work probes the boundaries between perception and technology.
Learn more at http://www.stefanschmidtart.com.
Fonts are built automatically by GitHub Actions — take a look in the "Actions" tab for the latest build.
If you want to build fonts manually on your own computer:
make buildwill produce font files.make testwill run Fontspector's quality assurance tests.make proofwill generate HTML proof files.
The specimen images and videos in documentation/ are made by python documentation/build-specimen.py, which also needs Mitsuba 3 (pip install mitsuba) and ffmpeg on the PATH.
- Added CRT, LCD and Matrix bold, italic and bold+italic static fonts.
- Removed U+00AD glyph.
- Decreased bold weight.
- First release.
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://openfontlicense.org