Feng and Huang [Variational principle for weighted topological pressure. J. Math. Pures Appl. (9) 106 (2016), 411–452] introduced weighted topological entropy and pressure for factor maps between dynamical systems and established its variational principle. Tsukamoto [New approach to weighted topological entropy and pressure. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys. 43 (2023), 1004–1034] redefined those invariants quite differently for the simplest case and showed via the variational principle that the two definitions coincide. We generalize Tsukamoto’s approach, redefine the weighted topological entropy and pressure for higher dimensions, and prove the variational principle. Our result allows for an elementary calculation of the Hausdorff dimension of affine-invariant sets such as self-affine sponges and certain sofic sets that reside in Euclidean space of arbitrary dimension.

Let $m_1 \geq m_2 \geq 2$ be integers. We consider subsets of the product symbolic sequence space $(\{0,\ldots ,m_1-1\} \times \{0,\ldots ,m_2-1\})^{\mathbb {N}^*}$ that are invariant under the action of the semigroup of multiplicative integers. These sets are defined following Kenyon, Peres, and Solomyak and using a fixed integer $q \geq 2$ . We compute the Hausdorff and Minkowski dimensions of the projection of these sets onto an affine grid of the unit square. The proof of our Hausdorff dimension formula proceeds via a variational principle over some class of Borel probability measures on the studied sets. This extends well-known results on self-affine Sierpiński carpets. However, the combinatoric arguments we use in our proofs are more elaborate than in the self-similar case and involve a new parameter, namely $j = \lfloor \log _q ( {\log (m_1)}/{\log (m_2)} ) \rfloor $ . We then generalize our results to the same subsets defined in dimension $d \geq 2$ . There, the situation is even more delicate and our formulas involve a collection of $2d-3$ parameters.