Lowercase leaving you cold? Introducing Retrocide

Dropping descenders to achieve a perfect baseline

Nostalgia fans rejoice – a new monospaced display font has made its debut, and this time every glyph shares the same baseline height with no descenders to interfere with the character flow.

The makers of the font, named 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 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."

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.

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."

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 Gemma and Needlecast also achieve the feat.

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."

"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.

Still, as the project's tagline goes: "Type like it's 1985."

They did things differently back then. ®