The DEC LA100 Letterwriter and Letterprinter had the best dot-matrix printer draft quality font ever, a serif-ish font. To my knowledge they were the only impact printer models, ever, to have that style of font as their 7-/8-/9-pin font. This is my tribute to it.
Tractor Feed Serif officially only covers printable ASCII characters from space (0x20) to tilde (0x7e). My sources were actual printouts from actual LA100 printers from 25 to 30 years ago. Online printout examples are nigh impossible to find, and I was not able to find even complete ASCII coverage.
is the font used on the DECwriter III and DECprinter III (LA120). It's a pretty good font if you want the overall style of what most dot matrix printers' draft quality fonts looked like.
Tractor Feed Sans covers ASCII characters from space (0x20) to tilde (0x7e) as well as a few ISO-8859-1 extensions and whatnots. Officially, only ASCII is supported. My sources are various online printouts. The letters with descenders look kind of goofy because these models had seven pins on their printheads, as opposed to the LA120's nine pins.
Fonts are available in regular and bold at the following aspects:
For best experience:
_____________________________ | __ | | | | | | | | Download | | __| |__ | | \ / TractorFeed.zip | | \ / | | \ / | | \/ | |_____________________________|
(Admit it, you were looking for the big green button with the downward pointing arrow.)
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Wafting zephyrs quickly vex bold Jim.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Wafting zephyrs quickly vex bold Jim.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Wafting zephyrs quickly vex bold Jim.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Wafting zephyrs quickly vex bold Jim.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Wafting zephyrs quickly vex bold Jim.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Wafting zephyrs quickly vex bold Jim.
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Darren Embry. Copyright 2025.
https://github.com/dse/tractorfeed-fonts