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Introducing Typography

March 29, 2024. pre-production samples arrived and we threw our first plugin on the display. it looked like crap.

TRMNL OG, March 2024

minutes later, anti-aliasing became a topic of daily conversation. with my colleagues and with my wife. our little consumer grade panel couldn't handle font smoothing, so we needed a bitmap option.

MVP

enter Nico and BlockKie. a huge thanks to creators Emily Huo and Joohn for their excellent work and gracious OSS licensing.

soon after we added Inter to the lineup, which is great for brief + large values like numbers and dates.

before Inter:

after Inter:

with fonts mostly figured out we shifted design effort to Framework, our UI library for ePaper displays generally.

whole product

making Framework a viable resource took a couple years and is the brainchild of Lucian. as fewer developers reached for <import tailwind> in their markup, we knew we were on the right track.

just last month we shipped v3.0 with color support, dark mode, and so much more.

Spectra 6 and BWRY palettes
Progress bars, grayscale, dark mode

Framework is part CSS, part JavaScript.

the CSS does what you'd expect: make things pretty. whereas JS modulations do fancy stuff: truncate text, abbreviate large numbers, even bump pixels to the very edge of a frame.

final form

today we're proud to announce Framework v3.1, which ships with 2x font bundles.

  • Classic includes Nico, BlockKie, and Inter
  • TRMNL includes three hand-made families in Regular and Bold weights

our starting sizes are 12, 16, and 21pt, optimized for the TRMNL OG 7.5" display.

TRMNL font - Basic Latin

each weight contains 694 glyphs spanning Latin, Western/Eastern European, symbols, operators, even dingbats.


Classic → TRMNL

TRMNL font is crunchy but smooth, tight but legible, bitmap-safe but ready to party. it's also going to be open source. friends don't let friends struggle with ePaper readability.

get started

if you build Private Plugins, upgrade to Framework v3.1 from the settings screen.

Pin a version or set to "track latest"

to try the TRMNL font on specific plugins, navigate to your Playlist and hover the (•••) icon > Presentation > Font Family > TRMNL.

Switch fonts on a per-plugin basis

to upgrade all your plugins to the TRMNL font, visit your Device settings > Palette configuration:

note that if a given plugin (native or otherwise) is pinned to an earlier Framework release (< 3.1), your font family preference will fall back to the Classic bundle until that plugin is updated.

for more information, read the docs:
https://trmnl.com/framework/docs/3.1/font_family

what's next

our first release has a few icons and some non-Latin characters. but we're thinking a native icon pack (trmnl-icon-star) might be useful too. or even Korean, and maybe a bitmap take on emojis.

we look forward to your feedback and can't wait to see what you build.

Ryan Kulp

Founder