Hyperfixed - Little By Little

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Astrid designs music hardware, and specifically circuitboards. And over the past few years, she's fallen in love with a specific font. But the software the font is in is being discontinued, and there's no way to export it. Where did it come from? Can she PLEASE help keep the lights on over here by becoming a premium member. https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/joinLINKS:The Little Character Font SetBelaThe Albert Einstein Institute Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hey there, I'm excited to tell you that one of our favorite Radiotopia siblings, Ear Hustle, is back with a new season. Ear Hustle is a show about life inside prison, but it's not your typical prison podcast. Co-host Nigel Poore and Erlon Woods have recently been spending time at four California prisons and have a season's worth of funny, surprising, and unforgettable stories to share. In a recent episode, they were able to visit a groundbreaking prison hospice, where they spoke to men who are grappling with the reality of dying inside prison. Also coming up this season are stories about the objects people keep inside their prison

cells, complicated mom-daughter relationships in prison, and incarcerated people who wonder whether they've become too comfortable behind bars. Stories about life on the inside told by those who live it. Find Ear Hustle wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman. This is Hyperfixed. On this show, listeners write in with problems, big and small, and I solve them.

Or at least I try. And if I don't, at least I give a good reason why I can't. This week, little by little. Is that room noise gone now? You know what it is usually, it might be the mic. This is Astrid. She lives in Berlin, and she works as a designer. But probably not the kind of designer you're thinking of. Yeah, I've changed this cable many times, but it's one of those audio mysteries.

Astrid is one of the co-founders of a company called Bella that, among other things, designs parts for synthesizers, the kind of electronic instruments I use to score the show. And if you're not familiar with the latest in digital music technology, imagine a large microchip. This microchip has a pressure-sensitive strip on the front, and when you attach this microchip to another machine, say, a synthesizer, you can run your finger up and down that strip, Something that sounds like this. Sound like this. Or like this. It's an extremely cool job.

And yes, I did use the production of this episode to justify my own purchase of one of Bella's signature models. I hope I don't get audited. It's for the episode. use the production of this episode to justify my own purchase of one of Bella's signature models. I hope I don't get audited. It's for the episode! I had to make this song with it! But that's not why I'm spending so much time talking about it. The reason I'm talking about it is because these Bella boards are actually where this week's problem begins. So recently, Astrid was working on a music project, and after years of using the same hardware, she decides this new project is a perfect occasion to order herself a brand new Bella Circuit Board.

Okay, so, a few days later, the board arrives, and Astrid is thrilled. But then, she notices something's off. Astrid can't quite put her finger on what's different about this thing, but something about it just doesn't feel right. So Astrid reaches into a drawer, she pulls out her old Bella, and as she's staring at these two virtually identical circuit boards, she realizes what's bothering her. And the difference I was seeing in these two boards was the font. The font on the circuit board, this like millimeter high letters that tell you the name and function of every

little port and plug on this device, it's different than it used to be. And it's not nearly as nice. I was like, the old board, this font is amazing. Why don't we use this font? This font is great. Crop to letters are really good. And this A, oh, I love it so much. And I looked at the new one and I was like, I don't like this at all. So Astrid reached out to one of the guys who manufactures Bellas hardware, and she asked them like, what's the deal with the new font? The old one was so great. This new one is so bad.

Why in the world would we change this thing? And the fabricator tells her, well, actually they didn't change the font on the circuit board, not intentionally anyway. What they changed was a much more fundamental part of Bellas production process. Their PCB layout program. So any kind of circuit board and any sort of electronics has to be laid out.

You have to place the components and trace where the copper goes between them and how they're connected electrically. And you do this in these software programs, which are PCB layout programs. A PCB layout program allows you to make a kind of virtual map of the circuit board you're building. You lay down all the little pieces, you decide where everything's going to go, how everything's going to fit together, and then you have it manufactured.

The thing is, not all layout programs use the same font. And apparently, Bella's old font, the amazing one that Astrid was in love with, belonged to this very old layout program called Eagle, which as of next year is no longer going to be in production. It is shutting down. So Astrid's like, well, okay, that's fine.

Most fonts are available for download somewhere on the internet. So theoretically, all I have to do is track down this font from Eagle and then export it to our new layout program. And so I started searching around and I found on a forum, Eagle is owned by Autodesk now, and I found on their forum this post which was somebody who's a photographer saying, can I have that font that you use in Eagle? Because I am often doing retouching on product photographs and I can't match the font.

I don't know what it is. And somebody at Autodesk replied to him and said, we've literally never had that question before. What? And no, it only exists within Eagle. And I was like, oh, interesting. What Astrid came to realize was that this font she loved so much was actually baked in to Eagle's source code.

So trying to extract it would be like trying to extract butter from a croissant. Like you just can't do it. But as far as Astrid was concerned, continuing to use the ugly font on her Bella boards wasn't really an option either. It's less legible, the letters are harder to differentiate, it's fundamentally less good for printed circuit boards. So for the past few months, Astrid has been trying to recreate her beloved eagle font. She's taken screenshots of every character and she's been tracing over them in vectors, which are just like mathematically defined lines to try and figure out the logic of how everything in this font goes together.

And it's through this process of tracing the lines of this font that Astrid has found herself facing the question, or one of the questions, that brought her to write into Hyperfix, which is essentially who the hell made this font and what the hell were they thinking? The thing is is that I keep looking at it because I've gone through it and I'm like working on recreating it you really have to understand all the angles and all the decisions you really get up close and personal with it and the thing that I'm like, working on recreating it, you really have to understand all the angles and all the decisions. You really get up close and personal with it. And the thing that I'm noticing is, like, there is a lot of logic.

Like, most things are just 90-degree and 45-degree angles. Which is why a lot of it looks, like, pretty consistent. But then you have things like this six. I don't even know what planet that came from. But then it goes back to, like, this kind of 45 degree thing again. Astrid shares her screen with me, and I can immediately see what she loves about this font. It's a monospace font, which means that every character takes up exactly the same amount of space.

So it looks very orderly and also very legible. Every character is distinct and clear, which is incredibly important for a font that is going to be shrunk down to the size that it can be printed on a circuit board. But then, there are certain characters that look just bonkers. Like this six she's talking about. The bottom half of the six looks like 45 degree and 90 degree angles, and then the top looks like a looks like the bent finger of someone accusing you of something. I don't know how to describe it. That's 45 degrees.

That's 45 degrees. I don't know what that is. It doesn't relate to anything else in the Fawn family. Same with the five. Like, I don't know what what that is, but then everything else is compliant. It's like all the orderly logical characters are what made Astrid want to recreate it. But the chaotic characters, the ones that are designed unpredictably,

they have made this font into a mystery that she can't stop thinking about. So while she was absolutely gushing over the A, which looks a bit like the way my daughter draws a house, the things we ended up discussing most were the things like the sixes. You see what I mean? The thing that I always find interesting about design is that no design decision is accidental.

Even when the design decisions are bad, there's reasons behind all of this. So none of this sprang out of the ground, none of it happened by accident. I have no explanation for it. It does feel like, I don't know, it's sort of like finding a painting at, I don't know, a market or like garage sale or something and going this person was an absolute genius. Who were they? And it's just like I don't

think I can ever find out. So Astrid has a couple goals for us. The first is that she wants to know if she can use her recreation of this font without getting sued. And the second is she wants us to find the creator of this font and find out what's going on here. Why was this font designed as weirdly as it was? I would love that so much. Even just to know who they were. I mean, like, you know, maybe they're not around anymore. I have no idea. But oh my God, yes, I would love that. I think that's all my questions. Astrid, this was so much fun. Like I, as a person who doesn't think about this stuff,

being forced to think about it, very exciting for me. We all really liked Astrid. And the fact that she designed a whole font to fix this problem she was having felt very hyper-fixed. So we were super motivated to help her find the person who created it. But I do have to come clean about something. Even before we spoke to Astrid, we were pretty sure we already found him. So, back when Astrid first wrote us, we did a little Googling about the problem she submitted. And on the website for Autodesk, which, again, is the company that owns Eagle, we found a promising looking update from 2017.

Whenever a program publishes some new version, they'll also publish some kind of description of the update. It's usually called patch notes or update notes. And almost nobody, except big nerds, ever read these things. But they can be very helpful for situations like when you lose some functionality, or when you're looking for some piece of information about the history of the program, like where a specific font came from.

And in this 2017 update we found on the Autodesk website, the developers say that Eagle has adopted a new font, and that new font was created by a guy named Andreas Weidner. This is already a very promising lead. Unfortunately, Andreas Weidner is a shockingly common name in Germany. So after we talked to Astrid, we focused our search on some of the old Eagle forums, and lo and behold, there was this one Andreas Weidner who'd authored an insane number of posts, including a 12-part series of essays on the various problems he was having with the Eagle user interface.

And so we're like, oh, okay, this is obviously our guy. We find out where he works, we find his email address, and we send him a message, asking if he'd be willing to talk to us. And he's like, yeah, okay. So the first thing I wanted to ask you is if you could share your name and your title with me. The name should already be there? Yeah, I just need you to say it for the show. Ah, okay. Yes. This is Andreas Weidner speaking here.

What do you do for a living? I'm doing for a living some electronics engineering, which is one of the reasons why I was using Eagle. Andreas doesn't just do some electronics engineering. He works at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hanover. And what they do there is literally more complicated than rocket science. Essentially, they're researching all aspects of the general theory of relativity.

And Andreas is one of those engineers, using Eagle to design the machines that make those experiments possible. So generally speaking, Andreas is a busy guy. But some point around a decade ago, Andreas carved hundreds of hours out of his one and precious life to design Eagles vector font virtually from scratch. You can very easily buy a program to design outline fonts, but I did not find any program that enabled one to design vector fonts. So I first had to program my own vector font editor and this took several hundred hours.

And afterwards I could begin designing and do the things on screen. I designed around a thousand characters or something. This was also surely 100 hours or so. The funny thing is, it turns out that Eagle already had a vector font. So why did this very busy guy devote so much of his precious time to redesigning a font for a super niche technical program. Did they hire you to do this or was this something you did purely voluntarily? No, this was just an idea of mine because I just hated

that font because it looked so ugly. Just like Astrid, Andreas hated the default font that was available to him. But he knew the programmers of Eagle didn't have the capacity to change it. They were too busy. They were a group of three programmers. And I mean, three programmers for such a thing do not have time to create a font. And then I thought, well, why not do this myself? Fueled by his hatred for Eagle's default font, Andreas decided to build a font that would better suit his tastes and needs.

At the time, he didn't actually know anything about fonts, so as he was tinkering with what this font should look like, he drew inspiration from an old international design standard, the ISO 3098. The ISO 3098 is an old white paper document that offers guidelines for what technical fonts should look like. It's basically like the elements of style, but for technical fonts. Andreas modified some of the design elements and added a bunch of unique letters to suit the needs of different European countries. And he said he had a blast doing it, especially the work he did on the Georgian alphabet. They use wonderfully looking font, very flowing, lots of round things in there.

I like that typographically. The only problem is I don't have the slightest idea how it really works. I don't speak the language. I do not have anybody who I can ask about this. So I just used newspaper cuttings to see what could be done. But it was real fun. And I like the result,

probably only because I have not the slightest idea about the language. In this moment, it felt like we'd answered most of Astrid's questions. We knew who made the font and why and best of all Andreas said that if Astrid wanted to remake the font he would not sue her for using it. But there were still some things we didn't totally understand. Like when we tried to nail Andreas down on some weirder design decisions that Astrid had been so

fascinated with, he didn't really seem to bite. There are some things about it that seem so unique, like the way that the six angles, like what made you decide to have such a sharp angle and like what were some of the design decisions you made and why you made them? For the six, there was no design decision involved because that is, as far as I remember it's exactly the standardized character as designed sometime in the 60s by someone. At the time I didn't think much of this. I hadn't seen ISO 3098 so I just assumed it must have had weird sixes.

I said goodbye to Andreas and he said he would send us the font, plus all the materials he used to make it. And I made plans to circle up with Astrid about everything I'd learned. But shortly after my call from Andreas, I got a Slack from Hyperfix producer Tony Williams, asking me to discuss the files that Andreas had sent him. Hey Alex, okay, so I have a bunch of stuff

to catch you up on. This is really embarrassing, but the first thing I need to tell you is that Andreas' font, it's not Astrid's font. Okay, can you send me Andreas' font? I'd like to see what it looks like. Yeah, give me a sec. Okay, it's in your slack. Oh, they are completely different.

Andreas's letters are quite round. Yeah, look at that A. Oh, that A is... that A is... how would I describe that A? That A is like a TP. It's TP-shaped. Yeah, absolutely. It is not that house-shaped A that Astrid's in love with at all. Okay, so that kind of sucks.

So where is Astrid's font? This is where things get fun again. So do you remember how Andreas told us that when he started working in Eagle, it already had a vector font, but it was like hideously ugly and so he had to redesign it himself. Yeah. Well, I found that old ugly font. Do you want to see it? I'm gonna share screens with you.

Yeah, go ahead. Is that? That's Astrid's font. So the font that Astrid has been fighting to preserve is the same font that Andres poured hundreds of man hours into destroying. Yeah, nerds, man. They have their opinions and they stick with them and they're vicious about them. I guess. Okay, so if the font we're looking for predated the font that Andres created, then it would stand to reason that it was made by one of the

three guys who created Eagle, right? That's what I thought too, but then I went back and listened to our conversation with Andreas, and I heard this thing that totally blew past me at the time. So Andreas says that the font he hated, it came from this compiler, a specific programming language compiler. Eagl always had a vector font, which was part of their programming language compiler in the 1990s. I also used exactly the same compiler, therefore I knew where that font came from. For the folks at home that aren't programmers, like myself, a language compiler is a type of software that is used to translate coding languages, like Python or JavaScript or C++ or whatever, into the only language that computers can actually understand.

Binary. The old ones and zeros, baby. Again, this totally blew past me at the time, so I didn't even think to ask what the name of the compiler was. So I reached back out to Andreas and was like, first of all, sorry dude, it's not actually your font we're looking for. And I was like, hey, you mentioned though that this old font came from a compiler that you were familiar with. Do you remember the name of that compiler? And he's like, oh yeah, it comes from this compiler called Turbo Pascal. So as soon as I get that email, I start googling frantically, like font, eagle, turbo Pascal, whatever. And I find this old forum thread, and I swear to God,

Alex, it's like this thread is the answer to my reporting prayers. Like the heavens open up, the angels are singing, everything is incredible. So in this thread, somebody is asking about this font, and someone else says, oh yeah, I know the font you're talking about. It's called lit.chr. So I google lit.chr, and bam, there's Astrid's font. Okay, so amazing. Let's go find who made it. Right. So I'm like, okay, the font is called lit.chr. It comes from Turbo Pascal. So this font was probably created by the person who created Turbo Pascal.

Hold on a second. Did you? Did you already solve this problem? Because the way you're unspooling the steps here, it feels like you are gearing up to tell me that you solved this problem. I... I might have. Well, well... What? Just hold on, hold on, hold on. We're getting ahead of ourselves.

I mean, I... Okay, so to be honest, like, I kind of felt like I shit the bed with this Andrea situation. I was so sure we had our dude and we did not. And I was like, I am absolutely not telling Alex how bad I fucked up until I have something good to report about this. And so then like, I kind of went down this rabbit hole, one thing led to another and everything got really insane. I can't believe how much work you have put into this

without my knowledge. But I'm sorry for interrupting. I want to know the answer. So please go on. I'm very excited. Okay, okay. I'm almost at the end. So I start looking for the dude who developed Turbo Pascal. And it turns out he's like a legend in software engineering.

His name is Anders Halsberg. And Turbo Pascal was like his first big break, but he's gone on to do a lot of other amazing stuff. Like, he helped write the coding language C Sharp, which is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. We've like both definitely played games coded in C Sharp, Alex. So I'm like, okay, this dude's a big deal. There's no way he's going to get back to me. But whatever, I have to try. So I email this guy guy and the very next day I get a reply damn. Okay Don't get excited yet

Ander says he recognizes this font from Turbo Pascal and he says he's seen it on printed circuit boards But he has no idea who made it But he says he thinks it might have ended up in Turbo Pascal because of the software company where he worked at the time, which is called Borland. Oh my fucking god, this never ends! Yeah, I'm going fucking insane at this point. But I tracked down these email addresses for the guys who started Borland, and I wrote to all of them. And... Alex. Did you find the guy who made the font?

After the break, the guy who made the font. We think. I mean, who knows anymore? This could go on forever! This could go on forever. This could go on forever. I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters. In print or here on the podcast, The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even

humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome back to the show. So before the break, Astrid desperately wanted to get her hands on a long lost font. And we found the font and interviewed the guy who made the font, except it was the wrong guy and the wrong font. And then producer Tony Williams told me an insanely convoluted journey that he took to find this guy right here. I'm impressed with how much research you did. I wish that every podcaster did what you did

because you look deep. This is Philippe Kahn. Today he runs a company called Full Power AI, which uses artificial intelligence for medical science purposes. But way back in the 80s, Philippe was focused on building one of the first graphics programs ever created for computers, which was called the Borland Graphics Interface. We were about a tenth of Microsoft, but yeah, we were the high-growth successful software company of the time.

And we were focused on technology that was important to a lot of hobbyists and developers because we were building really good development tools that were important to a lot of hobbyists and developers because we were building really good development tools that were helpful to people. Using the BGI Toolkit, built by Philippe and his colleagues at Borland, people were able to chart scientific data and build games and program spreadsheets. The thing was, they were doing all this graphics stuff on monitors that weren't designed for graphics. One of the important things about displaying things correctly on a screen that was not designed by graphics was to have decent fonts. So while

Microsoft was building fonts using rinky-dink pixel grids, Philippe and his team at Borland decided to take a different approach. This little font that you contacted me for lit that CHR with compose of vector strokes. Using vectors instead of pixel grids allowed the Borland team to create fonts that could be easily rotated and resized without pixelation. Which was really important at the time for games and other systems or even statistical analysis so you can label vertical axis, for example.

The other reason that this was so important was that at the time, there was no graphic consistency between devices. Every machine that came out had a different graphic driver and a different graphic card. So building vector fonts allowed the Borland graphic interface to generate consistent high quality fonts regardless of the capabilities of the device that it was running on. So then why, you might be wondering, do so many

of the characters look so kooky? If these vector fonts were so great, why, for example, does the top half of the six look like a staircase to nowhere? And the answer boils down to two factors. And the first of those factors is speed. A lot of machines had 64k of memory to run everything. For comparison, the average font nowadays is about 20 kilobytes. So if you loaded up a modern font on one of these old machines, it'd take up like a third of the memory of the whole computer.

We had to be very frugal. If I remember correctly, the file size for that font was probably less than 2,200 or maybe 2,500 bytes, which is very small for a font nowadays. I mean, nobody cares anymore about the size of things. But in 1986, everything was optimized for size and performance. Designing smaller, more angular fonts ensured that more processing power would be available

for actual computing. But that's not to say that the actual look of the design wasn't important. In fact, some of Astrid's favorite characters in this font were created to serve the very purpose that endeared them to her. I'm going to look like an old timer here, but I'm still upset every time I confuse a zero with an O, because in a lot of modern fonts, there's not a strikeout in the zero. I think that the idea was to get rid of my confusion about things. Maybe because I didn't grow up in the United States and I was an undocumented immigrant,

as they call it right now, and I was very confused by some of the fonts at the time that didn't clearly differentiate letters, as you know it is. But for all the thought and personal touches that Philippe put into lit.chr, which by the way was originally called little.chr, chr is short for character, Philippe was reluctant to call himself its author. Over and over again, he emphasized the collective work of the Borland graphics team, and in particular, the work of a young designer named Lisa. As far as he could remember,

she was the one who sketched out each and every character and really led the charge in figuring out how they should look and be built. So at the end of our call, we asked Philippe to record a message for Astrid, and this is what he said. So Astrid, thank you for asking that question because the most important thing to me was the fact that it got me to think about those days and what we were doing those days and how we were doing. about those days and what we were doing these days and how we were doing. And when I look back, there was a lady, and I can't remember her last name, called Lisa, who was key in developing that font. And we worked together to create something very readable.

And it's very exciting that you think that it's still an important font. I agree with you. But I think a lot of the glory needs to go to this designer that's a bit anonymous, Lisa, at the time at Borland, and thank you for asking that question. It's so wonderful to rethink about all these experiences. Absolutely warms my heart. About six weeks after we first talked with her, we got back to Astrid, and she seemed pretty happy with what we'd turned out.

I can't even tell you how wonderful it is to hear these stories from, you know, these really early days of computing and software where things were so different and there was so much innovation needed and these people did such brilliant, thankless, anonymous, amazing things. This is the true bedrock of the digital culture that we stand on and I just really, really admire people like Philippe and I care about his work so much. So we tried to find Lisa. We haven't actually found her. But since speaking with Philippe, we feel more confident than ever that this font that you love cannot be credited to just one person. Lit.chr was shaped by a lot of different people.

And that's kind of one of those things that feels a little lost in the modern day of creating things on the internet, especially computer related stuff. Sure, there's plenty of like open source software, but like everything was kind of open source in the early to mid 80s. And it's just like everybody was like borrowing from one another and there was a lot of sharing going on. And so that's how you get a font in Eagle, which was adapted from a font in Turbo Pascal, which was finalized for Borland Graphics Interface, which was created by a team of people who were probably inspired by fonts that existed before that.

So by remaking this font, you are just continuing that long tradition. Do I have to ask anybody's permission to release this as an open source font? Okay, so to answer this question, we did have to dig a bit, not only because copyright is an arcane and confusing legal schema, but because at this point, who even knows who owns this font? It was made in the 80s by a company that was bought by another company that was bought by yet another company. But in our research, we found that the law says, well, you can copyright a font file. You can't copyright the typeface itself, meaning the recreation of lit.chr that Astrid has been working on.

That's hers. She can do with it whatever she wants. You know, now I have like a conundrum, Alex. What's that? What do I name it? If I release it, what do I name it? I don't know. Lit.chr, formerly known as Lytle.chr, was adapted into the Borland Graphics Interface nearly 40 years ago by a team including Philippe Kahn and a designer we only know as Lisa. It was incorporated into a language compiler called Turbo Pascal, and from there it spread far and wide.

It was adopted by a printed circuit board design software called Eagle in 1988, then replaced in 2017. It wasn't designed to be beautiful. It was designed to be legible, and it was designed to be small, to take up as little memory as possible so that the computers it was running on could focus on other things.

And to a certain type of person, those intentions made it beautiful. Which is why, in 2025, nearly 40 years after it was codified at Borland, it caught the eye of designer Astrid Binn, who decided to recreate the font and give it a new lease on life. And she named it Little Character as a tribute to its lineage and the fact that

these characters were built little by little. You can download Astrid's font at hyperfixpod.com or from a link in the show notes. And Lisa, if you're out there and you hear this, we want to talk to you. Please email me at alex at hyperfixpod.com. This episode of Hyperfix was produced by Tony Williams and Emma Cortland. It was edited by Emma Cortland, Amore Yates, and Sirius Ophir Sukenek. It was engineered by Tony Williams. The music is by the mysterious Brakemaster Cylinder and me. You can get bonus episodes, join our Discord, and much more at hyperfixpod.com slash join. And next week on the Premium Feed, we'll be talking to Astrid about the time she fabricated a recreation of a fictional instrument from an episode of Star Trek.

Which is gonna be great. I'm so excited to put that one out. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.fm. Thanks so much for listening. RadioTopia from PRX.