Old Timey Code and Old Timey Mono Fonts
10 comments
·May 4, 2025dsevil
VTimofeenko
Thanks so much for making it! Usually fonts like this are a non-starter for me since they lack Cyrillic letters. Your inclusion of those symbols is much appreciated.
merecactus
Thank you so much for making and sharing this. I'm especially grateful that you included the code variant. I'm not a programmer but love monospace fonts but the lack of a slashed zero in so many otherwise lovely fonts has been a deal breaker for me!
bluenose69
Based on the first link, it seems as though zero and upper-case "O" are very similar. (My eyes cannot discern a difference, but I admit that my eyes are not top-notch.)
JonathonW
In Old Timey Mono, lowercase "L" and the number "1" are also very similar.
Old Timey Code fixes both of these-- it has a slashed zero and redraws the number 1 to be distinct (angles the top serif).
somat
The original typewriter had no "0" or "1" you were expected to use "I" or "O" in place. I suspect an authentic typeface should have trouble distinguishing them.
and having said that, forget authenticity, I really appreciate typefaces that make an effort to distinguish all characters.
chrchr
It's gorgeous. Thanks for making and sharing it!
Telemakhos
This is pretty nice: thanks for including polytonic Greek and macrons over Latin vowels including over y. I especially love how the breathing marks and accents look together over initial vowels in Greek, and I love zeta (ζ) and xi (ξ) in this font.
Might I make a few specific suggestions:
- allow combining breve over Latin y as well: sometimes that's handy for indicating contrast
- check the height of stacking diacritical marks: a perispomenos tonos or circumflex accent over a breathing mark over a vowel (like in εἶναι eĩnai) ends up stacking up tall enough to intersect with descenders (like on ζ zeta) from the line above
- the circumflex over alpha (ᾶ) looks really good, because it follows the curve of the alpha itself, but circumflex over eta (ῆ) looks off-center, because it left-aligns to the ear on the left of eta. The same could be said for the iota subscript (ᾳῃῳ): it looks great under alpha and omega, but it's a bit awkward under eta because of how far to the left it is.
- have you considered adding a variation for the Porsonic or single-curve circumflex?
mhd
I'm currently using an old copy of Letter Gothic 12 Pitch from an ancient Ventura Publisher CD, and like that style a lot, so definitely going to try this.
MartinGAugustin
[dead]
Based on Reproducing Typewriter, a letterpress typeface from c. 1906 used to create fake typewritten letters for promotional material. Where other monospace typefaces replicated actual typewriters, Reproducing Typewriter had improvements for better readability at smaller point sizes and/or where poor quality reproduction was an issue.
I thought its features would make it the basis of a good coding font, too. Old Timey Mono is much closer to the original while Old Timey Code makes it an even better typeface for writing source code.
It was the coding font used in the Turbo Pascal 3.0 user manual. I've not seen it elsewhere except old patents' cover pages.
Enjoy and if you have any comments or questions, comment or enquire away.
https://github.com/dse/old-timey-mono-font
https://webonastick.com/fonts/old-timey-mono/