Preface

I hate the default Minecraft font. I really, really do. Which is why while I am thankful of efforts from Compliance to make the font better to use by scaling it up, I believed the potential for this font to be further improved was being squandered for sake of authenticity and respect for a classic that while staid in the minds of many persons who grew up with the game, I find not enjoyable to use. So i released a fork of Compliance's work that I've been iterating upon over time to push, shift, move and on occasion completely rearrange the appearance of glyphs in Minecraft's bitmaps.

A lot of these pending changes shown in this article are going to definitively make my fork made of slights tweaks here-and-there into a new font variant. Some of what is explained are already part of my existing work. I've had some big plans about overhauling the font so it is more enjoyable to use, by deviating further away from the original intention of the default Minecraft font and conforming it to my vision of what the glyphs should look like.

This blog post will explain in excruciating detail with high-level (novice) terminology why I had decided to enact certain changes, since I am writing this less as an explanation of what I will do, instead posting this to ask if it's what I should do.

Behold

What you're seeing

Yes, this font is radically different from even Compliance's work. And so far, I only have the ASCII characters completed. So let me help you understand what you're seeing here.

Latin capital
The strokes in the middle of each character had been brought down by one pixel. This permits for extra detail otherwise not present in both Minecraft's original font and Compliance's 2x scale rework of it, as an exploit of the fact I literally have twice the pixels to play with. So you'll notice the font is less compressed at the top, more balanced overall in my opinion which based on that, biases my impression that these changes makes the font more enjoyable to read.

Specific letters have been outright remodeled. Everybody using my current Compliance Font+ work knows I am obsessed with legibility between letters.Q annoyed me especially so because to my aging eyes, it can look like an O, especially in time-based responses where I have to quickly distinguish letters from each other for winning a prize of some sort. As explained:

K — I just dislike the default K. Took X, removed a bit from the stroke at top-left, added a vertical stroke at far left.
M and W — Longer strokes in the middle, giving them a bit more of a "Tail" there.
Z — I took forward slash and added horizontal strokes to the top and bottom. Perfect? Hell no. Better? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Latin lower-case
Not too many changes to remark about, because these letters in my opinion were perfect as-is and didn't need much in terms of improvement. However;

b and d — No room for politeness in me; I thought they were too fat. So i shortened the stroke the top of the loop to make it one pixel smaller.

Arabic numeral
Remodeled and shown the same love I gave everything else, these numbers appear more distinguishable in-game based solely on their appearance, and doesn't feel incomplete, in a strange sense.

3 and 8 — Tucked in the "Waist" (as I liken it to) of each number by adjusting the curve of each stroke in the middle. Squeezing the waist in for eight especially makes it different from zero.
4 — I tried to go for something swoopy at the top of the left stroke to bring it in-line with 7 but it falls kind of short from doing that. While Minecraft uses one continuous stroke for four by cutting off the "Tail" at the right, I decided to bring in the right-most stroke a couple of pixels so as to make it really look like a four and because of height limitations, decided to make the four forked and made of two strokes, as what some video games with more strict bitmap constraints has to do in the past.
5 — handled it the same as I did Latin capitals, by giving it an extra pixel for the top to balance with the bottom.
7 — Instead of the chicane that represented the tail of seven, I made that into a single curved stroke starting from the right and ending a pixel past the middle.

Symbols
% — Percent actually looks like a percent sign now. Rejoice mathematicians. Also took some inspiration from Fixedsys / Fixedsys Excelsior for the zeroes shown.
& — Went with a more primitive "et" and per-se basing the character on lower-case T and giving it a couple of extra pixels in height to "Breathe" so it doesn't look so vertically constrained (Yes I know it's ampersand, that "word" is a standardized corruption of and per-se back when "and" was a letter of the English alphabet!)
£ — Gave the pound sign the respect it deserves. Rejoice Britain.

Semi-serifs
You'll notice missing pixels here-and-there, or some pixels pushed over to create more character in a typeface. A lot of that has to do with wanting to look unique, while still being legible and in-line with Minecraft's distinct styling. Generally, but not always if a stroke ends at the top, or if a stroke ends at the right it'll have a pixel dropped to taper the stroke. here are the list of characters which do not have these serifs applied to them:

3, A, B, C, D, H, K, M, N, O, P, R, U, c, h, i, k, m, o, x

Select characters such as m are modified, but appear to have no serif applied to them (and actually, was removed outright). Lower-case letters like d, b, p and q have the appearance of curvature at the bottom of the letter, implying there's a "Tail" next to the glyph body. Similarly, 6 and 9 (nice!) has a smilar trick at the end of the stroke where it meets with itself.

Also (, ), {, }, [, and ] had been modified so that they have a serif, as well.<, «, > and » has pixels removed to make the ends less blocky.

CTA

So what do you think? Are these good changes? If so, are these changes I should implement? What shouldn't I commit as a change? Let your thoughts be known below so I can adjust accordingly.