Zpix (最像素): a 12px pixel font for Chinese, Japanese and English

What problem a 12px CJK pixel font solves

Latin pixel fonts are common. Pixel fonts that also cover Chinese and Japanese at a small fixed size are not. Zpix targets that gap: the README describes it as a 12px font (11px plus 1px padding) with 21,998 characters covering English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese. The audience is narrow but specific. Developers building retro-style games, terminal emulators, pixel-art tools or demoscene-style interfaces who need CJK text to align to the same pixel grid as the Latin text next to it. The alternative, scaling a normal outline font down to 12px, produces blurry or hinted-away strokes for dense Han characters. A bitmap design sidesteps that by drawing each glyph on the grid from the start. Zpix is not a variable font, not a UI font for body copy, and not a substitute for a general-purpose CJK family. It is one size, drawn for one grid.

How the glyphs are built and shipped

The repository keeps sources in src/ and build tooling in tools/, with the public font files under dist/ and documentation under docs/. The build script is a shell script, tools/build.sh, invoked through npm run build, and the install-deps script names the two external tools it expects: ttf2woff2 installed globally through npm and fontforge installed through Homebrew. That tells you the pipeline is TTF-centric with a WOFF2 conversion step, and that BDF is a distributed output rather than the single source. The package.json declares no runtime dependencies at all, which is consistent with a font project: the artifacts are the deliverable, and the Node tooling exists for versioning and building. The README links both Zpix.ttf and Zpix.bdf from the GitHub releases page, so a consumer can pick either the TrueType file for application use or the BDF for bitmap-oriented tooling and embedded displays. A legacy build is also published as a separate tag, v1.2.1.

Downloading Zpix and using it in a page

The README does not describe a package manager install. It points to the releases page for Zpix.ttf and Zpix.bdf, and to the online sample at zpix.vercel.app for a visual check before you commit. The practical route is to download the TTF from the latest release, reference it from your stylesheet, and set the size to 12px so the glyph grid lines up with the line box. If you want to build the project from source instead of downloading an artifact, the package.json declares the engines it expects (Node 12 or newer, npm 6.4.0 or newer, Yarn 1.15 or newer) and exposes two scripts. The first installs the external build tools:

npm i -g ttf2woff2 && brew install fontforge

After that, the build script runs tools/build.sh:

sh ./tools/build.sh

Both lines are the command strings from package.json's install-deps and build entries. The Homebrew step assumes macOS or Linux; the README does not document a Windows path for the build.

The licence is the real constraint, not the file size

Zpix is free for personal products and free for education products. Commercial use is not free: the README lists USD $1000 for a single commercial product and asks you to contact the author for multiple products, with RMB ￥7000 given as the Chinese-language price. Two details matter more than the number. First, the README states that after payment the author provides a licence agreement but cannot issue an invoice. Teams that need a purchase order or a tax invoice will hit that wall. Second, the copyright notice is explicit that modification, decompilation, conversion, splitting and other reverse operations are forbidden in all licensed versions, along with unauthorised distribution, sale, rental or other profit-making use. That rules out subsetting the font to shrink a web payload, converting it to another format as a derived work, or merging glyphs into your own font. For a web project, shipping the full TTF is the only straightforward path the documentation supports. Treat these as product constraints to evaluate, not as legal advice; the author is the person to confirm terms with.

Where Zpix is the wrong tool

The single-size design is the biggest limitation. Zpix is drawn for 12px. If your interface needs 14px body text, 20px headings and a 32px display face, you need a family, and Zpix is one cut. Rendering it at non-integer multiples of the grid, or letting the browser scale it with a transform, will produce uneven pixels, which defeats the purpose. The modification ban is the second limitation, and it bites hardest on the web: you cannot subset the 21,998 glyphs down to the few hundred your page actually uses, so the full file ships. Third, the licence makes it unsuitable for closed-source commercial products unless the fee is paid and the no-invoice condition is acceptable to your finance process. Finally, the build path depends on fontforge and ttf2woff2 plus a shell script, and the README documents no Windows build. If you need a permissively licensed CJK bitmap font you can modify and subset freely, Zpix is not that font, and no amount of technical work changes the licence.

Zpix compared with Fusion Pixel Font

Fusion Pixel Font comes up alongside Zpix in search results, and the two take different positions on the same problem. Zpix is a single hand-drawn 12px design with 21,998 glyphs, distributed as TTF and BDF, with a paid commercial tier and a modification ban. Fusion Pixel Font, by its name and by how it is discussed, is a fusion of existing pixel font sources, which implies a different provenance model: rather than one author drawing every glyph, it assembles coverage from multiple fonts. That difference matters most for licensing. A fused font inherits the terms of its sources, which can be more permissive or more restrictive than Zpix, and it may permit the subsetting and conversion that Zpix forbids. The trade-off is stylistic consistency: a single-author font has one hand behind every glyph, while a fused font can show seams between contributing sources. If your priority is a coherent look at exactly 12px, Zpix is the more predictable choice. If your priority is a licence that lets you modify and subset, check Fusion Pixel Font's terms before assuming Zpix's will work for you.

Maintenance and upgrade cost

The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-08-31, which is recent. Release v3.2.0 landed on the same day, following v3.1.11 on 2026-03-20 and v3.1.10 on 2025-12-14. That cadence suggests the project is still being worked on, though the README does not describe what changed between those versions; the CHANGELOG.md file is where that detail lives, and the README only links to it. Upgrading is cheap in the technical sense. You replace Zpix.ttf or Zpix.bdf with the newer release, and if you pinned the size to 12px, nothing else changes. The risk in an upgrade is glyph-level: a font release can adjust individual characters, and the README gives no compatibility statement about glyph stability between versions. For a game where a specific character's shape is part of the art direction, that is worth checking against the CHANGELOG before swapping the file. Versioning is handled with standard-version, exposed through the versionup, versionup:minor and versionup:major scripts, which is a maintainer concern rather than a consumer one.

Editorial conclusion

Zpix fits personal projects, student work and prototypes that need readable CJK text at a fixed 12px grid, and it is the wrong choice for anyone who needs to subset, modify or redistribute the font files, since the copyright notice forbids modification, decompilation, conversion and splitting in all licensed versions. Before adopting it commercially, verify the current price and terms directly with the author at [email protected], because the README lists USD $1000 for a single commercial product and states that no invoice can be issued.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. SolidZORO/zpix-pixel-font on GitHub