Mona12
Mona12 is a pixel-style font that supports multilingual text, special symbols, and emojis that you can download for free. As the name suggested, the font characters were designed with the 12-pixel square box, therefore if on smaller font size or display with a low pixel density screen, it’s best to scale this font on 12px multiples (eg. 12px, 24px or 9pt, 18pt and so on) to ensure the pixel crispiness. On larger font size for prints or on high density screen like your mobile devices, any font size will work. It comes with two weights in Regular and Bold, however please bear in mind that the Bold version has lesser kanji character support compared to the Regular version.
In terms of the pixel font design, it’s being kept generic and simple so that in my opinion, to keep them functional and for easy multilingual language support maintenance. It supports the kana characters and up to JIS Level 2 kanji characters which means it covers most of the common use. Other than that, Mona12 also supports Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. You can download this font for free and be used on commercial projects. Mona12 is released under the SIL Open Font License, v1.1.
Usage Permission
- Free for personal, non-commercial and commercial use.
- Released under SIL Open Font License, v1.1
Link
To download, visit the page above (bear in mind the page is written in Korean) and click on the button highlighted in the image (direct link), and it should bring you to the font’s latest release on Github. Just click on the top link in Zip to download the package. Once unzipped the package, you will find multiple font files in there (You may check out the differences written in the Mona12 Github page) I recommend to install Mona12 that has all the characters, or Mona12TextJP if you are just focusing on the Japanese letters. Once installed, you will be able to select this font under the name “Mona12” in your design or writing tools.
Supported characters
- Hiragana and Katakana
- Kanji (JIS Level 1 + Level 2)
- Alphanumerics
- Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Simplified and Traditional Chinese script
- Symbols and Punctuations