Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
There're many free pixel-style fonts available, like FontsArena's W95FA and wixette's Dotted Chinese Pixel Fonts with Unicode support.
However, when trying to use those pixel-style fonts into pixel art, they are not pixel-perfect and blurry, or have broken outlines.
In Photoshop, anti-aliasing set to none, 7px high:
Is there any tool that could generate crispy text for a pixel art?
I think the native pixel size of the font might be 13px, or maybe 26px I can't be 100% sure. Anyway, it won't display right in any software at 7px. There's not enough pixels to render it properly at that size.
The first example font displays at 13px and multiples of that size in GIMP with anti-aliasing switched off. I can't try the Chinese one as I know nothing about typing in Chinese. Sorry.
In GIMP, text anti-aliasing off
It doesn't seem to work for me in Photoshop at 13pxt, but it does at 26px. Not sure what's going on with PS to be honest. It just doesn't seem to like 13px.
Photoshop at 13px with text anti-aliasing set to none
Photoshop at 26px with text anti-aliasing set to none
Edit: 24px also seems even better in Photoshop, and identical in GIMP. Perhaps that's the native size? 12px doesn't work well in either PS or GIMP.
Long story short: Use GIMP for pixel-style texts. Check Billy Kerr's answer.
Compared with other tools, GIMP supports bitmap font, which is always pixel perfect.
For OpenType or TrueType fonts, you need to set hinting to full, as hinting gives useful information on how to display font clearly in a low resolution.
In Windows, the ancient cmd.exe (conhost.exe for systems newer than Win 2000) still holds the ability to render bitmap font.[*] If there are not that many texts, simply press Win + R, type in conhost.exe, and then enter. Right click on the title bar, then select Properties.
Select "Font" tab then rolling down till you see "Raster Fonts" (aka 点阵字体). Choose the expected size and do a screenshot, using Snipping Tool that comes with all the modern Windows releases from Win 7 or whatever you're comfortable with.
Delete the unnecessary black background. In the end you get crispy bitmap renders!
Final work:
* Special note for high-DPI monitor users: You need to set monitor scaling to 100% if you don't want to bother with scaling down later!
