VT323
Designed By
Peter Hull
1 Style Monospace
Type Specimen / 01Il1 O0
{ } [ ]
VT323 · Regular
Compare letter widths, punctuation and figures in an aligned setting.
1 style available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download VT323 ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
SYSTEM READY, ENTER COMMAND
Every Position Counts
VT323 · Regular
Equal-width letters and figures.
Specimen.js
const family = "VT323";
function specimen(size) {
return { family, size };
}
specimen(24);0123456789
9876543210
Il1 O0 {} []
1 Style,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
SYSTEM READY, ENTER COMMAND
Peter Hull used a DEC VT320 text terminal in college and, in his words, kept an unaccountable nostalgia for it. VT323 is the result: the terminal’s own glyphs, rebuilt as a font.
The clever part is how he did it. The VT320 drew its letters with pixels that were not square, because of the way the terminal scanned its CRT, and the electron beam smeared each pixel sideways across the phosphor. A straight copy of the bitmap would have looked wrong. So Hull had a Python script move the pixel positions around to imitate that beam, aiming for what people saw on the glass back then, then had Python draw the result onto a square 1:1 grid as a black-and-white PNG. FontForge traced that image into outlines. He used GIMP along the way too.
An earlier variation, VT321, kept to a plain 1:1 pixel drawing. Hull prefers VT323 and uses it as his own terminal font, which is about as good an endorsement as a mono can get.
The character set follows the VT320’s, so it is limited by design; Hull warned people up front not to expect Esperanto. Even so, the file has 568 characters, including Vietnamese and a slashed zero. It runs narrow for a monospace. Set it big, in green or amber on black, if you want the full effect.
Characters & Figures
568 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
VT323
1 TTF style with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 44 KB ↓- Version
- 2.000
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/vt323/vt323.css">
body {
font-family: 'VT323', monospace;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
The family provides the heading; Inter carries the supporting text.
VT323 Heading · Inter Body
Letters, Figures & Code
Names, values and punctuation share a fixed rhythm. Compare the zero with the capital O, and the number one with the lowercase l.