by FelipeCortez
8 subcomments
- 1x5 can also work if you take advantage of subpixel rendering https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/
- The 5x5 is very nice, and the 3x5 isn't bad either. Unfortunately neither of them have all of ASCII. The size is also a bit misleading because you need to add spacing so really they need a 6x6 or 4x6 grid.
I'm quite fond of Spleen:
https://github.com/fcambus/spleen
It has a 5x8 font which has all of ASCII, but most glyphs are actually 4x8 and include horizontal spacing. I modified it to reduce the rest for a project I'm doing so all glyphs are 4x8. The result can be rendered on a 5x9 grid with a guaranteed line of horizontal and vertical spacing between all glyphs. It's very nice.
by archargelod
1 subcomments
- Most tiny fonts are actually terrible to read at a glance especially when they're rendered at 1:1 scale.
I've had a need couple years ago for a very tiny and compact font for a game mod I was making. And after trying a lot of 33, 35, even 2*5 fonts - they were all terrible to read.
In the end, I found "Gremlin-3x6" font[0] made by the guy named zephram. It's 1 pixel taller, but still a very compact when laid out horizontally. But, most importantly, all standard latin characters are pretty distinct from each other and it remains readable without zooming in too much.
Unfortunately, since then, zephram deleted his fontstruct account and all of his fonts. I have a copy of this font in my mod repo[1] along with a CC0 license and you can see the actual rendering of the font in the project screenshots[2].
[0] - https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1488093
[1] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/src/b...
[2] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/media...
- The site looks interesting, but it has a pop up called "navigation" that cannot be closed, and sits over the page rendering parts unreadable.
by rustyhancock
0 subcomment
- I love this but the licensing is ashame.
Does the NC in CC4.0 BY-NC-SA mean I couldn't for example sell a device using this?
What fustrates me about this is that it's such a narrow workspace, if I decided I wanted a 5x5 font there are very few ways to do that.
I get that this probably isn't copyrightable but at least make your license sensible.
by bmurray7jhu
0 subcomment
- Similar discussion for CJK scripts
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pix...
- Using multi-level grayscale instead of just two pixel states, on and off, can produce readable text at even smaller font sizes. The catch is that I have to say "text", not "letters", i.e., rely on humans inferring the too-blurry letters from their context. And I do not even need a specially designed font for that.
Example: https://imgur.com/a/text-80-characters-per-line-240-pixels-w...
That's 3 horizontal pixels per character on average, including inter-character spacing.
- If the author sees this. I think the lower case t would benefit from a pixel above the cross, similar to how the lower case k goes up one more pixel. It looks a lot like the capital T with how it is now. It is very well done though. Thanks for sharing.
- > 4x4: Not enough to draw "E", "M" or "W" properly.
However, 5x5 isn't enough to draw "e" properly if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase, so you need at least 6 vertical pixels. And then that isn't enough to draw any character with a descender properly, so you need at least 7 vertical pixels (technically you should have 8 in order to allow "g" and "y" to have a distinct horizontal descender while still sitting on the baseline, but this is probably an acceptable compromise). And remember that in practice this means you will still need at least 8x6 pixels to draw each character, to allow for a visible gap between letters below and beside them.
by konschubert
0 subcomment
- When I was building the layouts for my e-paper calendars , I needed pixel fonts due to the lack of grayscale on the display. It was surprisingly hard to find them - especially with customers asking for Cyrillic characters.
by TruthSHIFT
0 subcomment
- Don't forget Jason Kottke's Silkscreen font: https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/
- I always loved the 5x6 Pixel font in this classic 90s PC game:
https://covertaction.fandom.com/wiki/Cryptography_(Mini-Game...
The extra 1 pixel of height for the text in green, in particular, allowed for some cool "italic" styling, especially for letters like E, D, J, U, V
- This reminded me of work to get the C64 to do 80 columns in software, using a 3x7 pixel grid (with one row and column used for spacing), some of which were part of commercial products.
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=901
> Creating a 4×8 character set that is both readable and looks good is not easy. There has to be a one-pixel gap between characters, so characters can effectively only be 3 pixels wide. For characters like “M” and “N”, this is a challenge.
by happyweasel
0 subcomment
- Used this kind of font for output on the 320x200 screen all of the time in the late 80s while coding 68k asm on the Atari St
- "Images were displayed on an Apple 30" Cinema Display"
Yowsa. For those playing at home, that monitor is over 20 years old:
https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...
by JCTheDenthog
0 subcomment
- >Narrower 4x5 and 3x5 dimensions are possible, but would require sacrificing the M, dotted zero, and reduce U/V/Y distinctiveness.
I think 3x5 works well enough:
https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html
- I actually thought of this (or a previous similar project? The one posted here seems more recent...) just a few days ago while watching the announcement video for this new DJ device, since it seems to use a 5x5 font: https://driftdj.com/dj-hybrid
by huydotnet
1 subcomments
- I'm gonna use this article to explain to my peers about LLM quantization!
by userbinator
0 subcomment
- Looking at the screenshots shows why there's a reason 5x7 is the "standard" for tiny legible fonts that cover all of ASCII, e.g. as found in character LCD displays:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD44780_(integrated_circuit)
by chuckadams
0 subcomment
- Fonts like this are also great for huge screens like LED signage. Big pixels and very low resolution, so logically a tiny screen.
- Small g is unreadable. I obviously know the alphabet and despite that it took quite some time to understand what letter is that.
- Oh cool, I have to try these fonts on my amber CRT getting commands from an Elm webapp ([demo](https://youtu.be/M9Q5tFPtGaA?t=121), [code](https://github.com/Janiczek/crt-esp32-elm/tree/main/vdom/)) - there's not a lot of real estate in a 400x240 NTSC resolution. But the scanlined rendering has so much charm!
EDIT: realized a better demo for this discussion would be the photos I took of all the tiny bitmap fonts I had converted to the C array style at the time. Thread has more but here are my favorites: https://bsky.app/profile/janiczek.cz/post/3mh25atboz224
by shumatsumonobu
0 subcomment
- This is gorgeous. 5x5 is a wild constraint — every pixel has to earn its place. The fact that it's still readable at that size says a lot about the craft.
- The 3x2 is fascinating, it's the same resolution as braille, albeit rotated 90 degrees. I wonder if this could become a braille-like system that's both visually and finger-readable.
Note: there are repeat glyphs here like c and o, though the example actually uses a different c somehow. But perhaps repeats are ok given context.
- I developed a font with a similar resolution that was not nearly as legible for my Pi Zero with an e-ink screen many years ago. It allowed for similar tooling such as the flipper zero and esp32 marauder projects. I should fire that project up and implement this font…
- Somewhat relevant, I learned a mapping of individual characters to colors with a chrome extension I made, so the text size doesn't really matter since words are just sequences of colors.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rainbow-text/jhkgcm...
by SyzygyRhythm
0 subcomment
- The ship computers in the old game Privateer (and probably Wing Commander) had a pretty nice pixel font. Most of the characters were 3x4, but with a few niceties: descenders (j, p, q) could go below the normal outline, and wide glyphs like m/n/w were more than 3 pixels wide. Overall, pretty readable for uppercase/lowercase/numerics, and included a few "futuristic" touches.
by larsbrinkhoff
0 subcomment
- The LINC minicomputer operating system LAP6 came with a 4x5 font, but it didn't have lower case.
by dnnddidiej
4 subcomments
- Makes me wonder. Geeks are happy to learn a new keyboard layout. What about a new alphabet that can give higher on screen density of data. Now 3x3 isn't necessary because we have high res monitors. We need 26 distinguishable shapes for a-z.
In theory (focusing on non colourblind english speakers) there could be say 8 distinct colours and 8 shapes giving 64 chars.
- This is cool, but my problem is the opposite: I have a modern laptop screen with tiny pixels. What I need is then a huge bitmap font... does anybody have any?
by parlortricks
0 subcomment
- This is great, i use a 3x3 font i drew up for lowres games, though there are many example that look mostly the same since it is such a small space.
- Some non-ascii characters will be hard on 5x5 like ñ o É
- You could call it the "Minimum Viable Font"
- In the 3 x 2 example, the text is supposed to say “can probably” but I think the glyph for b was used instead, so it reads “you ban probably”.
by rahimnathwani
0 subcomment
- 6×3 is also good (fits on a 7×4 grid).
https://archive.org/details/zx_Tasword_2_Tutor_1983_Tasman_S...
- You can get nicer 5x5 fonts amd it was not that uncommon back in the day. 4 wide is not too bad if you make the center of M and W just two pixels inset from top or bottom respectively or borrow the spacing column.
Plenty of systems did it like CP/M on the Spectrum +3 and it looks pretty decent.
- If you start from the bottom of the page directly and scroll up then the 5x5 looks even better.
- One nice use for these tiny fonts is large text in terminals. Unicode now has 2x4 (from Kaypro), 2x3 (from Teletext, TRS-80), and 2x2 mosaic characters. Unicode also has 3x3 large text (from HP terminals) but font and terminal support is limited.
- IIRC the really cheap Casio Organizers/DataBanks of 90's used 5x5 font. And then my ex used something like that on linux in order to fit a ridiculous amount of xterms onto 14" CRT (somewhat absurd feat with her congenital vision defect).
by GolfPopper
1 subcomments
- I didn't seen any mention of Tony Pai's quite good 3x3 font (only uppercase):
https://tonypai.itch.io/3x3-pixel-font
- You could do a bit better with a 4x5 font for every characters except M, W, m, and w which would be 5x5 but use the pixels normaly used to separate them from the next character, so every caracters still use the same width.
by pugworthy
1 subcomments
- CGA era developers are like, "Yea been there done that..."
- ...and don't forget "twoslice": https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html
I haven't done the pixel-by-pixel deviation checking, but they may be comparable and independently derived!
- A 3x5 font does not sacrifice the M or W. H,M,W end up as similar looking characters, but the M has the center pixel one higher, and the W has the center pixel one lower.
- I've used 3x5 fonts on a couple of embedded projects and honestly the biggest pain isn't the font itself, its getting the spacing right.
by JoshTriplett
0 subcomment
- These look great.
I would have loved to have seen a sample of the 4x5, not just the 5x5.
by DonThomasitos
0 subcomment
- Incomplete blog post! Where was the comparison vs. a 1x1 pixel font?
- simplifier has a 4x4 version : https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4
by IvanK_net
7 subcomments
- Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already.
It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).
- Wouldn't something like this be ideal for devices like Xteink X4?
- Very cool for anyone with flawless eyesight!
by tliltocatl
0 subcomment
- At that point, just go Braille! Amazing work anyway.
- The 3x5 size is pretty common in wplace, it's a good compromise.
- Like dot matrix printer fonts
- See also u8g2 fonts: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/index.htm... (available also in original C at: https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall)
by onlyrealcuzzo
0 subcomment
- I love the design of your website!
- I remember a weird font with a special alphabet made of dots or something like that. Not Braille, it was for fast reading or such.
by russellbeattie
0 subcomment
- I think on my 6.8" WQHD+ 3200 x 1440 phone screen (70.5mm width), an actual 5x5 pixel square might be the size of a period → .
Doing the math, 70.5mm / 1440px = 0.05mm per pixel, x5 = 0.25mm wide. Just a guess though, I'm not exactly sure how big a period is without a microscope.
- And for 1x1 screens
..........................
- Many decades ago it was anti aliasing with MS clear type that made small text possible. Yet, before that, for regular TV, this had been worked out, so lots of text could be shown on things like business TV, in glorious analogue PAL or never twice same colour for Americans.
Small text is an interesting problem, but we have moved on from pixels as useful units.
- Gonna have to ask for a proportional version of this font.
I mean, look at the capital "I".
;-)
- I have used this one before, it uses one fewer pixels per char: (4x6 = 24 < 25 = 5x5)
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1656341/tom-thumb
by analog8374
0 subcomment
- bunk! he left out 1x1
by analog8374
0 subcomment
- i really like your website design
by LandenLove
0 subcomment
- Now do 1x2 using Morse code.
by thesuperevil
0 subcomment
- Gg
by connorboyle
0 subcomment
- [dead]
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