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Distortionary

Filter 06 · Nixie tubes · 0.1 beta

Nixietyper

Words lit in a row of tubes.

Each character gets its own tube, lit in neon behind curved glass, and the tubes stand in a row as on a counter, a clock or an instrument panel. Every tube has its own seed, so no two are bent, worn or blown alike. The whole picture is composited in linear light, and the glare from all the tubes is laid over it at once.

A free, in-browser demo: the whole renderer, compiled to WebAssembly. Nixietyper isn’t sold as a plug-in; the demo above is the tool.

Try it on your photo Tell me when it’s out
  • GIMP 3
  • Photoshop
  • Desktop app
  • Command line · Enterprise
The digits 1957 lit in orange neon, each in its own glass nixie tube, hung in a row on a dark ground.
counter, set in Anokath. 
$ nixietyper render -l counter -t 1957 -o counter.png

The command that rendered it. Command-line tools come with Enterprise.

Try it live

The real filter, compiled to WebAssembly. Nothing leaves your browser.

One tube per character. Up to sixteen.

Look
Font
1

Each tube is bent, worn and blown its own way; the seed picks which.

Open the full Nixie tube maker → A free tool: more controls, custom fonts, background and size, PNG download and a shareable link.

How it works

4 steps, each doing one thing.

  1. 01

    Set the words

    One tube per character; `\n` breaks lines. Spaces blank a tube or leave a gap. The tubes fit the picture at one scale, aligned left, centre or right.

  2. 02

    Light a tube

    The character is drawn as a lit cathode in neon, with the dark unlit wires behind it, inside glass that catches a highlight and a little grime. The glyph comes from a bundled display face: Anokath, a fourteen-segment tube after the Burroughs B-7971, or RetroChunki, a sixteen-segment lamp cell after F. W. Wood’s 1910 signal-light patent. 1

  3. 03

    Vary every tube

    Each tube is seeded on its own, so its glow runs a touch brighter or dimmer, and its grime and burn-in sit heavier or lighter, the way the much-lit places of a real display age faster. One seed picks the whole row.

  4. 04

    Composite in light

    The tubes are mixed in linear light, not sRGB, so the neon adds like real light. Then the glare from all of them — halo, bloom and streaks — is laid over the whole picture at once, as a lens would see the bank of tubes together. 2

Specimens

Each look at its defaults. The last is RetroChunki, from Cast Iron Type; the rest are Anokath.

1957 in orange neon nixie tubes.
counter: numerals on a dark ground.
1200 lit as a nixie clock.
clock: an even, steady read-out.
60 lit in two large tubes.
meter: a couple of big tubes, as on a gauge.
READY lit across a row of tubes.
panel: words on an instrument panel.
HELLO lit in a long row of tubes.
marquee: a long line of lit tubes.
NIXIE lit with heavy glare.
glow: the glare turned well up.
2024 in sixteen-segment lamp cells.
counter, set in RetroChunki’s sixteen-segment cells.

Parameters

Every control, named.

The same names in every host and in the JSON presets. With an Enterprise license, the command-line tool reads those presets and runs them on a thousand files.

Name Range Effect
look counter · clock · meter · panel · marquee · glow A starting point; everything below can be overridden.
font anokath · retrochunki The display face each character is lit in.
seed any integer Which way every tube is bent, worn and blown.
glow · wear 0–1 How hard the cathode burns and how dirty the glass is.
gap · margin · align shares of a tube How the tubes are spaced and fitted to the frame.
variation 0–1 How much the tubes differ from one another.
spaces blank · gap A dark tube, or no tube at all.
background colour · none A ground behind the tubes, or transparency.

Hosts

Built on

  • fandango-nixie-transformer

    The engine: one tube from one glyph.

  • Cast Iron Type

    Anokath and RetroChunki, the bundled display faces.

Notes

  1. 1

    Wood (1910). U.S. patent 974,943, “Illuminated Announcement and Display Signal”. The lamp cell behind RetroChunki.

  2. 2

    Debevec and Malik (1997). Recovering high dynamic range radiance maps. Why the tubes are mixed in linear light.

Pricing

Nixietyper isn’t packaged yet.

Try it above in the meantime. The plug-ins that are ready are on the pricing page.

Tell me when it’s out

The other filters

Bloom and glare

Bloomifier

Glow that follows the eye, not a blur slider.

Pattern screens

Patterntastic

Halftones in any shape you like.

Dithering and old screens

Retrotastical

Twenty-five dithers, and the cable and tube they came through.

Distressed type

Grungetyper

Type that wears like the real thing.

Masks

Octodoctor

Masks from gradients and keys, snapped to edges.