tom-font

TOM (for Terminal OSD Mono) is an ASCII art font designed to be displayed directly in a terminal. It mimics the aesthetic of the old VCR OSDs: big blocky letters built from Unicode block characters (█, ▄, ▀, ▙, ▟ and so on).

Repository contents

Path	Description
vcr-osd-2-byte.txt	Full alphabet, wide rendering (2 characters wide per pixel column)
vcr-osd-2-byte-aligned.txt	Same alphabet, but all letters aligned on a single line per row (handy for copy-pasting a full word row by row)
vcr-osd-2-byte-digits.txt	Digits (0-9) in the same style
1-byte/vcr-osd-1-byte-char-aligned.txt	Compact variant (1 character wide per pixel column), full alphabet aligned
mini/letters.txt	Miniature variant using thin Unicode characters (sextants/octants) for a very dense rendering, only 3-4 lines per letter

The letter A, three ways

2-byte (wide):

  ▄████▄  
▄██▀  ▀██▄
██      ██
██      ██
██████████
██      ██
██      ██

1-byte (compact):

 ▟█▙ 
▟▛ ▜▙
█   █
█   █
█████
█   █
█   █

mini (octants, dense - font coverage may vary):

 𜷋▆𜶻 
𜷥𜴂 𜴅𜷤
█𜴳𜴳𜴳█
🮅   🮅

How it works

Each letter is drawn as a small grid of filled/empty characters that, once placed side by side in a monospace terminal font, visually form the letter - like the on-screen display of an old VCR or retro console.

Example (letter A, 2-byte rendering):

  ▄████▄  
▄██▀  ▀██▄
██      ██
██      ██
██████████
██      ██
██      ██

The *-aligned.txt files allows to compose a word by assembling letters side by side, row by row.

Use cases

• Banners and logos shown at the start of a script or CLI
• Title screens in terminal tools/TUIs
• Retro / VCR aesthetic effects for terminal projects