petykowski / london-underground-dot-matrix-typeface

A set of dot matrix fonts in the style of TfL's Underground arrivals board.

London TFL Dot Matrix Typeface

A set of dot matrix fonts in the style of TFL's Underground network. Each font weight represents a unique typeface featured on TFL arrivals boards and rolling stock led announcement boards.

London Underground Regular

This typeface sets out to recreate the font used on dot matrix arrival boards found across London Underground stations in late-2019 / early-2020.

Character Set Details

This font includes a full alpha character set (upper and lower cases), numbers, and symbols - ' & * +.

London Underground Medium

This typeface sets out to recreate the dot matrix font found displayed on London Underground 1996 Stock.

Character Set Details

This font includes a full alpha character set (upper and lower cases) and symbols ! ' , - . / : ; & \.

NOTE: Unverified Characters! This font currently includes 'best effort' characters due to a lack of reference materials for certain letters. Please contact me on Twitter, or raise an issue on GitHub if you have photographs of these characters.

• F j q U V X Y Z

London Underground Bold

Character Set Details

This font only includes a full number set and symbols :.

London Underground Heavy

This typeface sets out to recreate the font used on dot matrix arrival boards found across London DLR stations in late-2019 / early-2020.

Character Set Details

This font includes a full alpha character set (upper and lower cases), numbers, and symbols - ' , * ().

Reference

London Underground Regular, Bold, and Heavy is sourced from original photographs of dot matrix arrival boards found across London Underground stations during late-2019 / early-2020.

The following photographs are an example of the particular dot matrix style which was referenced in the typeface creation.

London Underground Medium is sourced from video recordings found on YouTube. Attributes as follows:

• Tony - Transit & Games
• X2K9
• Random Transport
• Mongchong 123 (Thanks @robhagemans)

Contribute

Build Additional Characters to Existing Typeface

From Adobe Illustrator template file:

1. Build New Character
   • Add new artboard
   • Provide name of character for layer and artboard
   • Build character on separate layer
2. File > Export > Export As...
3. Export Artboards as SVG
   • Choose Export location
   • Format: SVG (svg)
   • Use Artboards Checked
   • All Artboards Selected
   • Maintain default SVG options

Add Characters to Existing Typeface

Open .sdf file in FontForge

1. Select character to update
2. File > Import
3. Set width to width of character + 100
   • If svg width is 600 then set element width to 700

Generate Font

1. File > Generate Fonts
   • Maintain default export values
2. Save into font directory of repo

License

This typeface is distributed with an SIL Open Font License.

london-underground-dot-matrix-typeface's Issues

Windows issues

Hi there, I am hoping you can talk me around where the breakdown is between your gorgeous font files and Microsoft.

My computer insists ALL the font files are not valid no matter how I try to install them, preview them, or insert them into the folder.
I can see the XML looks right viewed in notepad++ but obviously it is upset with something. Do you have any insight on how to fix them?

Chris

F is for Finchley Road

F for Finchley Road, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNvYzgR3Pk (at 0:54)
This one has a reflection or shadow, but it looks like the glyph should be 9 pixels wide (or possibly even 8) instead of 10.

Similarly, the E from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCehoiuMYfE (at 0:00) is 9 pixels wide, so they probably both are.

Q is for Queensbury

Hi, kudos for this project! For a long time I'd been sitting on the Tube idly staring at the displays and thinking one day I should recreate the bitmap font, but obviously never actually did!

As I'm in NW London I thought I was in a good position to help with the missing Q, K and F, and have some hope of one day spotting a U. I realise you said "contact me on Twitter", but I'm not on Twitter, so here goes. I'm attaching a small number of video stills that I played with for the letter Q - more than happy to share the original stills or the whole video clip, which is about 12 MiB.

I'm a bit disappointed with the quality of the picture so may need to go back and take a close-up when I feel like it some quiet day.

However what I think I can see is that the "leg" of the Q doesn't seem to extend to the inside of the "O", and instead extends below the baseline and to the right of the right bound of the "O" it appears to me they made the Q asymmetric so as to have an even gap either side of the leg. I read it like this:

...@@@@@@.....
..@@@@@@@@....
.@@@....@@@...
.@@......@@...
@@........@@..
@@........@@..
@@........@@..
@@........@@..
@@........@@..
.@@......@@@..
.@@@....@@@...
..@@@@@@@@@@..
...@@@@@@.@@@.
...........@.. 
..............
..............

I also took a clip at Kingsbury which I'll open a separate ticket for once I've had a look. F for Finchley Road and hopefully a stray U (Underground?) to follow.

K is for Kingsbury

As in my post on Q, some (slightly disappointing) photos of the capital K from the Jubilee line at Kingsbury.