- There's a whole subculture for fonts smaller than 8 by 8, with real world uses for things such as small LED displays, for example. This is at the extreme end, though.
Also https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font
- I think readability is helped a lot by the low entropy of English words and sentences, i.e. if you can’t make out one letter, you’ll probably get it anyway from the context.
It’s not so readable if you test it with random strings.
- This brings back fond memories from the 8-bit era. Tasword II was a text processor for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum where the developers resorted to extra-narrow fonts to cope with the Speccy's very limited (256x192) screen resolution.
The lower screenshot in [1] provides a glimpse of what seems to be a 3px wide font.
OP's 2px width are a bit too extreme for my taste though.
[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4000080/Timex/Tasword_...
- White space around each letter is completely critical for fonts like this. That makes this font 4x4 as presented, or 3x4 but you lose a lot of readability—too much imho.
The exception to this would be a physical manifestation, where each 2x3 pixel block was surrounded by a dead space, so that the display was actually optimised for this font configuration.
Still, that’s an impressive accomplishment, allowing a 16x32 character display on a sub 1$ oled, and 10x18 on a 3$ integrated computer with built in display.
Nice work.
For anyone actually thinking of using tiny fonts in a practical project, imho 4x5 (3x4 plus padding) is about as small as it gets for a font that doesn’t require extra work to read, giving 1 pixel of (violable) padding bottom and right. Unlike the OP font, it only needs 1px of top padding to be perfectly readable, so you are actually getting “free” readability compared to needing top+bottom padding like the OP font.
by kstrauser
1 subcomments
- I'm blown away. I'd have sworn that wasn't possible. It's brilliant. Bravo.
- Capital H is cursed... unconnected pixels, indistinguishable from 'ii' or "II". The concept's cool, but for this one point the wrong choice was made.
- Meanwhile, 3x5 fonts are actually usable.
- Well I think to make fonts like these legible, the trick is to use texts as examples that the readers already know, then you don’t really need to recognize very letter, but just the one here and there to keep up overall recognition. It also helps to focus on letters that are most readable.
But tongue in cheek humor aside, this is a neat accomplishment. It’s a great idea to stretch the letters out in width, greatly improves readability. (Earlier approaches Fokus a lot on trying to stay square, which doesn’t really work at this size)
- I wonder what the minimum resolution of Chinese characters is. It’s definitely more than 2px tall.
- Very cool - note that lowercase b, l and h are the same
by Eric_WVGG
1 subcomments
- Really like that zero glyph. I wonder if, instead of Roman numerals, one could use ligatures to encode numeric strings as binary… 42 as 010101
(I sort of randomly picked 42, didn't know it was such an interesting string… Douglas Adams must have known that)
by librasteve
0 subcomment
- I eagerly await the use of this font in Microsoft’s new EULA
- Some of the characters/words (particularly "c"/"can") sort of look like they've been cropped from the top, trusting the brain to fill in the bottom half. Reminds me of what Sandisk did with the "S" in their redesign. I wonder if there's any research behind this?
- xyv, bl, hi, in various cap/uncapped formats, are the same characters or nearly indistiguishable. I'm trying to craft the most unreadable sentence possible. I got as far as "Hi, THe czech's bliss is exact"
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- A thread last year with lots of related subpixel type things:
Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase (2015)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39735675
- Fwiw--Joe is also the creator of Leaving Earth:
https://joefatula.com/#leavingearth
- > You can probably read this, even if you wish you couldn't.
Um... Nope. I can't.
I can get some of the letters, but not most of them, unfortunately.
Love the concept, and the art, that goes into things like this. But I just cannot read it.*
* I have nerve problems in my eyes. I'm not legally blind... Most of the time.
- Trying to read the text produced by this font makes my brain hurt
by NooneAtAll3
0 subcomment
- I was so confused why "o" in the example was wider than "o" written myself - until I understood that example has it capitalized... That seems useless
- It says in all caps: “YOU CAN PROBABLY READ THIS, EVEN IF YOU WISH YOU COULDN'T.
IT TENDS TO BE EASIER TO READ AT SMALLER SIZES.”
by magackame
1 subcomments
- I wonder if it's possible to train to read text encoded as one colored pixel per letter, or even per token.
by strawberrysauce
2 subcomments
- Wow, can't be used as a braille alternative that people with sight can also understand?
- I wish I had this back capability when I used to program my TI graphing calculators back in highschool!
- X has had a 2 pixel bitmap font, `nil2`, from time immemorial (i.e. it's in X10).
- I wonder what happens if you allow greyscale, even if just 2-4 bits per pixel
- I love this. It speaks to me in a similar ways as a lot of the AI zeitgeist—why shouldn’t we optimize for how the brain actually operates at scale versus hundreds-years-old ideas about ligatures designed for reading in candlelight? (In the AI case, a romanticism for having to learn and prove memory in such a rote way)
- I can't really read anything with that, so somewhat readable is very moot.
by ccvannorman
0 subcomment
- finally, my vim window can hold 200+ lines on my laptop screen!
- okay but what about "c" being nearly the same as "z", neither of which look like the character and are nearly(?) identical. Is our brain supposed to just be able to figure it out?
by BobbyTables2
0 subcomment
- Wonder if any OCR implementations can read it!
by rclkrtrzckr
0 subcomment
- Pity there's no italics ...
SCNR
by rimprobablyly
0 subcomment
- Abomination. I love it!
- Is it just me or the s Z and z S should be swapped?
- The Atari 2600 had pretty good vertical resolution (assuming you could set up the next line in 76 cycles) but limited horizontal resolution. A 3x5 font is possible, but good luck distinguishing N from M.
This font seems to use characters up to 5 pixels wide, which helps with its near-legibility.
by notorandit
0 subcomment
- It is readable in English with quite some training and context.
Many characters have the same representation.
I for one would say this is not generally usable and has a limited scope.
Interesting nonetheless.
by kelvinquee
0 subcomment
- Love this. Brings so much joy. Try some punctuation. Hilarity ensues.
- Cool. I hate it.
- Thanks, I hate it.
- Now do 1 px.
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