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bitsy

a little engine for little games, worlds, and stories · By adam le doux

Bitsy font usage license?

A topic by Flo created Feb 14, 2023 Views: 393 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 3

Hi,

I'd like to make a comic out of a bitsy game I made and I'm wondering if I can use the standard Bitsy font for the text in the comic  & what license is attached to the font. Who made the font? Adam himself? Is there a TTF file for the font somewhere? I couldn't find anything on that topic, please excuse me if I missed something ^^

Thanks in advance!

Flo

Hi Flo! I do know that Zone used the same font as bitsy and you can find a .ttf here: https://github.com/Ragzouken/zone/tree/main/public/ascii_small_simple

Zone itself is under the Anti-Capitalist Software license: https://github.com/Ragzouken/zone/blob/main/LICENSE

I hope this helps!

Hi! Thanks for the reply, I'll check it out! The TTF file should help already!

(1 edit)

Hi Flo, thanks for the question! 

The origin of the standard bitsy typeface is a little bit of a mystery. I did not create the standard bitsy typeface, and I'm not 100% certain of its origin. I got the typeface from a professor years ago when I was in college, and he said it was ok to use in bitsy when I asked, although he also could not recall who made the typeface originally. Out of curiosity, I did a little more digging today to see if I could learn anything more, and the closest match I could find online was a font on this site (https://robhagemans.github.io/monobit/#fonts) called "Terminal_Bold_21", which apparently was part of Windows 3.1. It's not exactly the same though, since the bitsy version includes some characters not in this font - maybe it's a variation or altered version.

IANAL, so this is just my non-expert understanding, but I believe that bitmap typefaces are not copyrightable (at least in the US), so it should be free for you to use without a license, regardless of its origin.

Thank you so much for the insight! It's really quite a bit of a mystery, but your input helps a lot!

happy to help!