VT323

Try VT323

Weights and styles

• Regular 400VT323 Regular

About VT323

VT323 is a monospaced bitmap-style typeface that reproduces the letters of the DEC VT320 text terminal. Peter Hull, who used that terminal in college, built it with Gimp, Python and FontForge: a script shifted the original dots to mimic the way the electron beam lit the phosphor and stretched each pixel horizontally, drew the result on a square grid, and the grid was traced into outlines. That is why, in the specimen, strokes look like short overlapping horizontal bars and vertical stems are thicker than a single pixel. The author mentions an earlier variant, VT321, that uses plain square pixels. VT323 is a single Regular 400 file with 584 glyphs for Latin, Latin Extended and Vietnamese, and it is not a variable font. It was added to Google Fonts in 2011 under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Where VT323 works

Retro computing interfaces

The letters come from a real 1980s terminal, so a mock console or boot screen looks period-correct.

Pixel-art and indie games

Fixed-width pixel glyphs suit dialogue boxes, scores and menus drawn on a low-resolution grid.

Terminal windows

The author uses it as a command-line font; equal character widths keep output in columns.

Headings on developer blogs

A line of VT323 above ordinary text signals code and hacking culture without an image.

Posters with a CRT look

The sideways smear built into each pixel gives large words the glow of a tube display.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Turkish
• Polish
• Czech
• Slovak
• Hungarian
• Romanian
• Croatian
• Slovenian
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Estonian
• Vietnamese

Character sets found in the files: latin, latin-ext, vietnamese. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with VT323

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use VT323 on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "VT323";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/VT323-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "VT323", monospace;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves VT323 with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=VT323&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Smear is part of the drawing

Each dot is stretched sideways in the outlines themselves, so the CRT effect appears at every size and cannot be switched off.

One style

There is no bold or italic; the terminal's glyphs were converted as a single font.

Built from a terminal character set

The author notes that the VT320 offered a limited set of characters to start from; the current file holds 584 glyphs.

FAQs

Collections with VT323

• Pixel and arcade fonts

  Bitmap-style and dot-matrix display fonts after 1980s game screens, terminals and LED panels, for retro games and tech graphics.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All monospace fonts