Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide
- Reference: 1759766574
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/10/06/retrocide/
- Source link:
Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font [1]READ MORE
The makers of the font, named [2]Retrocide and available in TrueType, OpenType, and WOFF2 formats, reckon the monospaced font is great for code editors and terminals, with "perfect alignment."
There has long been a demand for monospaced fonts, where each character occupies the same width, allowing for consistent spacing. Microsoft [3]Cascadia Code , bundled with Terminal and the default for Visual Studio Code, is a great example of the breed. Others include the legendary Courier and Ubuntu Monospace.
A monospaced font ensures that columns of characters are aligned correctly. But there are still those pesky descenders that can break an otherwise perfect flow of characters.
Which is where Retrocide comes in. The makers claim it is "ideal for terminal aesthetics, synthwave UI, and tight typographic grids," with "Ultra-angular geometry inspired by 80s chrome lettering and hacker title cards."
[4]
It's also a nod to ticket printers that didn't bother with fripperies like an extra few rows of pixels to make lowercase characters look less like an afterthought, or systems so short on display memory or resolution that adding extenders was a needless extravagance.
[5]
[6]
For this writer, it serves as a reminder of the early days of computing in the 1970s and 1980s, when trying to fit a lowercase descender into an 8 x 8 pixel matrix often involved some interesting contortions and an appearance that could occasionally be described as "a bit wonky."
[7]
Enthusiasts for micros such as Sinclair's finest (although not the QL, which featured nifty 9-pixel tall characters), or Commodore's 8-bit efforts will recall lowercase letters such as "g" and "y" that looked a little jarring compared to traditional typefaces. Designers would have to leave a vertical pixel column empty, and do the same horizontally, into which a descender could be squeezed.
Or they could follow the example of the Texas Instruments 99/4a home computer, and dodge the issue by making lowercase the same as uppercase, just... smaller. Yes, it looked as subjectively strange as it sounds.
We asked font designer Damian Guard what he thought about Retrocide, and it met with his approval. "It seems like quite a nice font," he said, "You certainly can squish up the descenders into the baseline, and a few fonts have done it." His own bitmap fonts [8]Gemma and [9]Needlecast also achieve the feat.
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Guard went on: "I think the descenders on Retrocide aren't too bad, but they do look quite uneven given that the designer went so tall on the ascenders."
[11]Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0
[12]Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits
[13]Website fined by German court for leaking visitor's IP address via Google Fonts
[14]In defence of Comic Sans
"As with all font design, it's a bunch of trade-offs vs personal opinions."
He concluded, "Still not a bad looking font at all - between the showcase page and the styling of the font it's giving me a bit of a vector display vibe - perhaps I should dust off my Vectrex tonight."
Higher DPI displays and more pixels dispensed with the issue. There was more space for descenders on screens, and character widths that fitted the character rather than a grid of 8 x 8 pixel squares.
The font illustrates how far font rendering has come in the last 40 years. It also harks back to a time when tapping in code from the listings in a paper magazine was a popular pastime. And sure, losing descenders means code can be even denser. However, we're not sure that everyone will appreciate that particular aesthetic.
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Still, as the project's tagline goes: "Type like it's 1985."
They did things differently back then. ®
Get our [16]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/14/font/
[2] https://github.com/geonot/retrocide-mono/tree/main
[3] https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aOQ8A19dI9tTcaz8QVp_DwAAAMk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aOQ8A19dI9tTcaz8QVp_DwAAAMk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aOQ8A19dI9tTcaz8QVp_DwAAAMk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/10/06/retricide.jpg
[8] https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/gemma/
[9] https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/needlecast/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aOQ8A19dI9tTcaz8QVp_DwAAAMk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/20/gimp_3_and_photogimp/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/where_computing_went_wrong_feature_part_1/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/31/website_fine_google_fonts_gdpr/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2011/01/31/verity_stob_comic_sans/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aOQ8A19dI9tTcaz8QVp_DwAAAMk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Cute
See here for the demo page: https://geonot.github.io/retrocide-mono/
It's definitely cute, very vector CRT like a Tektronix. Briefly tried it with some of my code, comparing it to venerable old Lucida Console and Consolas, and I would not actually use retrocide except for a mood thing. I just found it less instantly parseable. Descenders actually help with that! Perhaps that would change with enough time spent, but it doesn't seem worth the investment. So... switch this in when you need to show people your screen and want them to think you're a super l33t haxxor.
Re: Cute
One of the women who ages ago developed the font for UK road signs said that they chose mixed case because capitalised words with risers and descenders could be recognised from the word’s shape alone, before the word could actually be ‘read’.
Re: Cute
Very true, and very definitely not this case with this font.
Their demo page includes the sentence "Retro aesthetic meets modern clarity" - I had to re-read it because I didn't recognise the final "y" in the word "clarity". So I'm not sure it works as a font, but as a practical demonstration of irony it's magnificent.
Re: Cute
Impressive; the fonts displayed on the page you reference, on this out-of-the-box linux mint, show the expected descenders. Presumably the designer expects me to download it just to see what it looks like. What was wrong with an actual image, so it could actually be seen?
And as an aside; I doubt very much that I'll be using it for the reasons you mention. Descenders are part of the English glyph system, improving legibility. Hiding them is not necessarily a bad thing per se , but given what I'm used to, I think I'll be sticking with it.
Re: Cute
If you scroll to the end of the page, you can see the "no descenders feature". https://geonot.github.io/retrocide-mono/
Meh.
And what's up with their "g"? It's confusing out of context.
Re: Cute
@Neil I had to enable Javascript on the page with NoScript (or equiv) to get it to show the actual font. Otherwise you just get browser default. It's not showing images, it's actually trying to render the font in your browser (good) but needs JS to do that (ugh).
Limited character set
I followed the GitHub link. It lists the contents of the published font. It basically contains the ASCII set and (apparently) that’s all
That’s quite limiting so even if it’s the most beautiful typeface in the world, it’s of limited use. This can all be fixed of course but for now…
Re: Limited character set
Seems the [1]Bedstead font already did this years ago and has many more non-English glyphs.
[1] https://bjh21.me.uk/bedstead/
> into an 8 x 8 pixel matrix
Luxury! I know I worked in 5x7 fonts (they are [1]still common for small work), and recall a 4?x6 CRT typeface which took time to read; I mostly used that to get overview on large documents on a 1970 TV screen.
[1] https://fontstruct.com/gallery/tag/386/5x7
5x7 was (still is) a common format for matrix character-based LCD and LED displays, but with the equivalent of a pixel gap both horizontally and vertically, these were effectively the same as at least 6x8 on a fully bitmapped display. BBC Micro characters were drawn on an 8x8 grid, but left the rightmost column and bottom row clear to avoid characters running in to each other. The cursor fitted nicely into that 8th row too.
I created a 4x5 character set for a project once, simply to allow more information on screen. It wasn't easy to read, but it did mostly preserve word "shape".
And I still find it easier to read old 9-pin dot matrix printouts of long-forgotten code (so long as the ribbon wasn't worn out) than onscreen or laser-printed A4, even if in a nice monospaced font.
M.
I'll echo the comment about British road signs, ascenders and descenders are visual cues. The difference between fast and slow readers is how frequently the eyes stop to take in the next bit of the text. Since recognition is a gestalt process, those cues are very helpful in taking in more text at a time.
That said, the font looks kind of cute, and may have significant value as a display font. I don't want it in my text editor, but it could look great on the cover of a book.
The lack of descenders
Was due to the low resolution of displays at the time. If you have a limited number of pixels to represent a character, descenders are more difficult to represent and restricts the number of lines you can display on a monitor/TV (and the fewer lines you can display the fewer columns you can display unless you make letters weirdly narrow)
People were more than happy to make "compromises" in the font if it meant getting more characters on the screen at once.
Or You could Just tYPe like this.
You would still be usinG fewer caPs than Donald.
With tYPefaces, theY work if theY catch on, and theY catch on if theY work. SomethinG to Ponder on there.
Looks very similar to Epson dot matrix characters.
It's a typeface, not a font.
I feel I've lost that battle.
Priorities
" "It seems like quite a nice font," he said "
Ultimately, subjective aesthetics should be subordinate to legibility. The job of a typeface is to convey information without imposing strain on the reader. Designers could do worse for a start than take a few lessons from the illustrious Betty Binns (Better Type, Watson-Guptill, New York 1989).