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by int_19h 2160 days ago
I wish somebody made a bitmap font based on VGA 8x16, but scaled up to look nice on 4K screens. I'd seriously pay for that.
2 comments

You could make your own, using pixel art scaling algorithms. (It's also very easy to scale binary images programmatically in something like GIMP by converting to true color, using low-artifacts Lanczos scaling and then going back to b/w binary. That gives you a very similar rendition to pixel art scaling, with no pixelation or blur but a smooth, painting-like effect.)
https://int10h.org/blog/2018/05/flexi-ibm-vga-scalable-truet... ? :) (Edit: not a bitmap font, but to make it scalable to arbitrary sizes it pretty much has to be an outlined .ttf).
Nope, that's not it. An algorithmic approach won't do here - it needs an actual human filling pixels in on the basis of aesthetics rather than math.

It doesn't have to be scalable to arbitrary sizes - 2x of the original would do just fine on a wide variety of high-DPI screens, just as the original itself worked on a very broad historical range of non-high-DPI ones.

OK, then I think I get what you mean - scaling up the glyphs 2x and adding more bitmap detail, but perceptually sticking to the original shapes as closely as possible.

That's something I thought of in the past but it proved trickier than I expected to actually get nice enough results, so I never actually got very far with it but it's not impossible.

Yep, it's basically high-res pixel art. So it needs a good artist, and a lot of time. I doubt anybody's likely to do it as a free project, hence why I mentioned paying for it - a crowdsourcing arrangement, perhaps