o
Picture-tube bowls
Every bowl is a squircle, the shape of a 1970s screen. Where a stem runs straight on, the corner stays square.
READY.TUNING…
DEGAUSS
A mixed-space typeface in four tape lengths.
Plays the degauss wobble on the screen above. Burn-in stays: degaussing fixes colour, not worn phosphor.
913characters in each weight
60coding ligatures
4fixed widths
2weights, same widths
4formats: TTF, OTF, WOFF2, WOFF
Four tape lengths.
Not monospaced, not proportional. Every character takes one of four fixed widths, named like cassettes: 30, 45, 60 and 90 are the 2 : 3 : 4 : 6 of an octave, a fifth and a fourth.
C30300 units
i l ! . , : ; ' |
C45450 units
f j r t I ( ) [ ] { } /
C60600 units
a b c d e 0 1 2 A B C = + ␣
C90900 units
m w M W @ Æ Œ … — Ж Ш Ю
Two C30s make a C60. Three make a C90. Two C45s make a C90.Every width is a multiple of 150 units.
Space, figures and box drawing are all C60, so indentation, trees and tables of figures still line up on the C60 cell. The four space characters (C30, C45, C60, C90) can close any gap of two steps or more, so even mixed lines can be aligned exactly.
Try it on the tube.
Type anything. Switch weight, change the phosphor, raise the glow, or leave a ghost burned into the glass.
Weight
Phosphor
Built like equipment.
A small set of rules, applied everywhere: square where a stem runs on, round where the tube curves, and a notch at every joint.
n
Bloom traps
The notch at each joint is drawn in on purpose. A lit tube blooms where strokes meet; the traps fill with that glow, so a glowing n stays as even as a printed one.
0O
The power-off zero
Switch off a tube and the picture collapses to one bright point. The zero keeps that point, clear of the walls, so it never reads as O, Ø or θ.
i;
Phosphor dots
Tittles, periods, colons and accents are true circles: the beam spot among the squircles.
2359
Segment figures
2, 3, 5, 6 and 9 come from the seven-segment display, with the corners rounded off. All figures are C60, so columns of numbers line up.
if (tape) play();if (tape) play();
Bold that never reflows
Bold keeps every Regular width, so a keyword your editor bolds never pushes the rest of the line along.
Code, on a console.
Keywords in Bold take the same room as Regular, and ligatures keep each character's own width, so carets and selections land exactly where they would without them.
Degauss Regular and Boldcalt on
60 ligatures, one rule.
A ligature forms only from a complete run of operator characters, so https://, =>> and <<= stay exactly as typed. The small line under each shows what you typed.
Every character.
Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, operators and arrows, box drawing, scanline shades, keyboard, power and tape-deck symbols. The bar under each glyph shows its width class.
Loading the character list…
Press play on tape.
This deck is text. Frames and meters are box-drawing and block characters, the buttons are Unicode transport controls, and every line is padded to the same width with Degauss's four spaces.
Take the signal home.
Install both weights for your editor and terminal, or self-host the web fonts. The kit has every format, the CSS, the character list and the full construction source.
Download the font kitFree for personal and commercial use under the MIT License. Version 1.0.
On your computer
Open both .ttf or .otf files. On macOS choose Install in Font Book; on Windows right-click and choose Install; on Linux copy them to ~/.local/share/fonts/ and run fc-cache -f.
In your editor
Set the font family to Degauss and turn ligatures on. Regular and Bold are one family, so editors that bold keywords use the real Bold. Read the font notes.
On the web
Keep the WOFF2 files beside degauss.css and link the stylesheet. Add degauss-phosphor for the glow, or degauss-prose to tighten word spaces in running text.
Self-hosted CSS example
Put this beside the downloaded WOFF2 files.
@font-face {
font-family: "Degauss";
src: url("Degauss-Regular.woff2") format("woff2");
font-weight: 400;
font-display: swap;
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Degauss";
src: url("Degauss-Bold.woff2") format("woff2");
font-weight: 700;
font-display: swap;
}
pre, code {
font-family: "Degauss", ui-monospace, monospace;
font-variant-ligatures: contextual;
}
Background
Other type and machines built on a small set of fixed widths:
- Monotype
- Hot-metal faces were designed to an em of 18 units, and every character was a whole number of units wide, from 5 for i and the period to 18 for W.
- Linotype
- Duplex matrices carried two styles, such as roman and bold, so both had to share widths. Type with that property is still called duplexed, or uniwidth.
- IBM Executive, 1944
- A proportional-spacing typewriter with four character widths: two units for letters like i and l, up to five for m and W.
- CJK fonts
- Many Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts are duospaced: every character is half-width or full-width.
- iA Writer fonts
- Duo (2017) sets a few wide letters at one and a half times the usual width. Quattro (2018) uses four widths: half, three-quarters, one, and one and a half.