This is a font born from staring at photographs of forty-year-old plastic. Someone looked at the keycaps of a Commodore 64 keyboard — the actual physical legends stamped or printed onto the keys — and decided to reverse-engineer them into a usable digital typeface. Not the screen bitmap font everyone already has. The keycap lettering. The distinction matters. The project ships as TTF, OTF, and webfont, with editable outline source files in a glyphs/ directory and build scripts for anyone who wants to modify the work. A preview.html file lets you click PETSCII graphic symbols into a type tester and copy them out. The character set covers uppercase Latin, numbers, punctuation, arrows, the British pound sign, selected accented characters including Hungarian diacritics, function-key labels f1 through f12, and classic C64 key legends. Lowercase input maps to uppercase — because that's what the keys show. The real craft lives in the 63 PETSCII graphic front legends. These are the blocky geometric symbols printed on the fronts of C64 keys, accessed via Commodore+key or Shift+key combinations. The creator reconstructed them as smooth vector outlines rather than tracing photographs pixel by pixel. Identities and key assignments reference the Ultimate Commodore 64 Reference; frame thickness, curves, and proportions are inferred from the keyboard photograph. The project is explicit about this: these are reconstructions, not exact traces. What makes this more interesting than the average retro font project is the discipline of the constraint. The creator chose to reconstruct what was physically printed on plastic, not what appeared on screen. That's a narrower, stranger target — keycap printing was its own production process with its own tolerances and aesthetics, distinct from the pixel grid of the VIC-II chip. The font captures an industrial-design artifact, not a software artifact. The GitHub repository is clean: version-controlled at 1.107, build instructions included, original photographs withheld (presumably rights or size), editable outlines open for modification. It's marked as independent and unofficial. The PETSCII encoding guide and key map documentation round out a project that clearly cares about doing the thing right rather than shipping fast. This is a niche object — a font for people who remember (or care about) what the physical C64 keyboard looked like and want to reproduce that specific texture in their own work. Demoscene folks, retro-computing enthusiasts, designers who want that particular weight of nostalgia without reaching for the obvious screen-font option. It's small, careful, and exactly as ambitious as it needs to be.
