Platinum Fonts

English | 简体中文

Pixel fonts for interfaces and terminals, drawn on a 12-pixel grid. They set Latin text alongside Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and stay sharp at 12 pixels and its multiples.

Families

• Platinum Sans: a proportional sans for interface text.
• Platinum Sans Small: a smaller sans for dense layouts, such as toolbars and status bars.
• Platinum Mono: a monospaced font for terminals and code. Chinese, Japanese and Korean take two cells, aligned with the Latin. Programming ligatures and the icons of Nerd Fonts are built in.

Each family comes in Regular and Bold, and in four regional versions: SC (Simplified Chinese), TC (Traditional Chinese), JP (Japanese) and KR (Korean). They share their Latin glyphs; the version decides the regional forms of the Han characters. Pick the one for the language you read most.

Install

Download a zip from Releases. Each format comes in its own zip:

Format	For
otf	macOS, Windows and most applications
ttf	Applications that do not take OTF
woff2	Web pages
otb	Linux desktops (GTK, Pango)
bdf, pcf	X11 applications

• macOS: open the font files and click Install Font.
• Windows: select the font files, right-click, and choose Install.
• Linux: copy the font files to ~/.local/share/fonts and run fc-cache -f.

Use them at 12 pixels

Each glyph is drawn pixel by pixel on a 12-pixel grid, so the fonts are sharp only at 12 pixels or a multiple of it (24, 36…). At other sizes they blur.

Where	Size
macOS (Retina or not)	12 or 24
Windows at 100% or 200% scaling	9 pt or 18 pt
Web pages	font-size: 12px or 24px

On Windows at other scalings, such as 125% or 150%, no point size lands on whole pixels.

Platinum Mono in a terminal

Set the font family to Platinum Mono SC (or TC, JP, KR) and the size to 12.

• Line height is built in, so leave your terminal's line height at its default. A cell is 7 pixels wide and 14 tall.

• Icons draw two cells wide but advance one, as in the Nerd Font fonts (not Nerd Font Mono). Leave a space after each; tools such as eza and Starship already do.

• Ligatures join => != <= -> :: // and others, 31 in all. They are on by default, through the OpenType feature calt; BDF and PCF have none. To turn them off:

  Application	Setting
  Ghostty	font-feature = -calt
  Zed	"buffer_font_features": { "calt": false }
  VS Code	"editor.fontLigatures": false
  Kitty	disable_ligatures always
  WezTerm	harfbuzz_features = { "calt=0" }

• Ambiguous-width characters, such as ○ ★ and Greek and Cyrillic letters, take one cell. Keep your terminal's ambiguous width set to narrow, the usual default.

For developers

The fonts are also Go packages that draw text into images; see Development. How each family is made, with its metrics and sources, is described in Design.

License

The fonts are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Platinum Mono also contains ligatures under the MIT License and icons under the licenses of their icon sets; NOTICE.md lists every source and its license. The code is under the MIT License.