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.
I wonder if there are really tiny fonts that make use of color. For example, this 2-pixel wide Picket Right font could theoretically be even thinner if we were to use sub-pixel features.
At least, I think the 2-pixel high Two Slice font can be more legible with some anti-aliasing.
Don’t stop at colors. Just add a ligature for every string and support for animations and you have yourself a font that can render any alphanumeric string in a single pixel. I’ll need to brush up on Morse code though.
Pad grid controllers like the Novation Launchpad, and its indie, open-source counterpart, Mystrix Pro, have an 8x8 grid. At first this style of controller didn't use any lights, but as the manufacturing and features progressed, they went towards one RGB LED per pad. So, of course, you end up doing some text and graphics on the resulting grid. Mystrix uses a scrolling marquee which isn't ideal, but does get the job done.
And yeah, you could throw on more hardware to have a display nearby and use that for text. That is not the problem being solved though.
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.
One of the first Spectrum emulators (JPP?) used a VGA text mode with 2 pixel high font where each character was its own ordinal, i.e. 65 was two rows of 01000001 pixels. That meant you could draw individual rows bytewise exactly as the Spectrum did, and just take care of the Y offset bit shuffle, and fake the colour clash.
I think most of what makes this font readable is the user using context to sort of guess at what the word could be.
If you start writing things that aren’t sentences normal people would use (or especially if you start mixing case) it doesn’t hold up. Still interesting for a “normal” use case though.
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?
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)
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?
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.
The thing to do with a 3x5 font is to make the capital N into a giant lowercase n. Then M H and W all become similar letters, just with a different location for the horizontal bar.
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 wonder if there are really tiny fonts that make use of color. For example, this 2-pixel wide Picket Right font could theoretically be even thinner if we were to use sub-pixel features.
At least, I think the 2-pixel high Two Slice font can be more legible with some anti-aliasing.
Yes. https://advent.blinry.org/2018/17
Direct link: https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/
Don’t stop at colors. Just add a ligature for every string and support for animations and you have yourself a font that can render any alphanumeric string in a single pixel. I’ll need to brush up on Morse code though.
and https://stormgold.itch.io/two-slice - are these the same authors or what?
Ah! the reddit user description hoverbox for u/trampolinebears says "Fonts: stormgold.itch.io" so that connects the dots.
Dad?
That one is relatively easier to read, I guess because it looks like normal font that was cut into strips.
Ya literally I could make out 85% quickly.
The linked one is unreadable at all to me lol
Thanks for sharing this. I enjoy seeing these cool subcultures; they evoke the hacker ethos.
I’m not a hacker but I really appreciate their ethos. It’s like punk. I’m not punk either. But I will defend it all with my dying breathe.
There's some quilting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236312 .
> such as small LED displays
The highest DPI screen is 127,000 PPI. You could fit over 14,000 lines of 8x8 text in a single inch tall screen.
For reference, a decent monitor is 140 PPI.
I'm pretty sure we don't need to go below 8x8 if physical size is the issue.
Pad grid controllers like the Novation Launchpad, and its indie, open-source counterpart, Mystrix Pro, have an 8x8 grid. At first this style of controller didn't use any lights, but as the manufacturing and features progressed, they went towards one RGB LED per pad. So, of course, you end up doing some text and graphics on the resulting grid. Mystrix uses a scrolling marquee which isn't ideal, but does get the job done.
And yeah, you could throw on more hardware to have a display nearby and use that for text. That is not the problem being solved though.
No, small LED displays with like 25 ppi. Think arduino/embedded.
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_...
One of the first Spectrum emulators (JPP?) used a VGA text mode with 2 pixel high font where each character was its own ordinal, i.e. 65 was two rows of 01000001 pixels. That meant you could draw individual rows bytewise exactly as the Spectrum did, and just take care of the Y offset bit shuffle, and fake the colour clash.
I'm blown away. I'd have sworn that wasn't possible. It's brilliant. Bravo.
[flagged]
Do you think anyone is suggesting this should actually be used for a practical purpose?
Idiotic seems strong. It's an art piece, is it simply not to your taste in art?
Exactly. My taste in art skews idiotic, so what! :)
I wonder what the minimum resolution of Chinese characters is. It’s definitely more than 2px tall.
Apparently 8x8, for most characters traditional Chinese characters: https://imgur.com/DBRSqIn
Probably lower for simplified Chinese and katakana/hiragana Japanese characters.
I'd say that at 2x2, "Two Slice" is definitely not readable.
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 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.
Meanwhile, 3x5 fonts are actually usable.
Yep, and very easy to read on low resolution. Master Of Orion have 3x5 fonts and they are very clear and easy to read.
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.
Try reading "HiGh sky buys The lies" in the font. Pretty difficult to make out what it says...
I think most of what makes this font readable is the user using context to sort of guess at what the word could be.
If you start writing things that aren’t sentences normal people would use (or especially if you start mixing case) it doesn’t hold up. Still interesting for a “normal” use case though.
I'm more concerned about V X Y all being identical.
How will I know if it's waxy or wavy?
Like all of language: context.
Why would hair be like 80s synthpop, or potatoes be in any way related to a by-product of honey?
Hair can be either waxy or wavy or both.
Her long blond waxy hair blew in the wind.
Context.
Her wa[]y hair was a challenge for the hairdresser
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)
101010 - I'm guessing you know, and want to find out how long it takes for someone to notice and respond.
little endian vs big endian.
Very cool - note that lowercase b, l and h are the same
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?
I wish I had this back capability when I used to program my TI graphing calculators back in highschool!
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.”
> 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.
It's not easy but I definitely could read it. It's easier if you don't try and read each word fully before continuing.
Yeah, a lot of words/letters made sense, but I definitely had to use some deduction to read it.
Interesting, and given the limitation, it’s quite impressive.
But I think “probably” is optimistic. I’d say “possibly” is more realistic.
I wonder if it's possible to train to read text encoded as one colored pixel per letter, or even per token.
Given how people can learn languages, absolutely yes.
Pity there's no italics ...
SCNR
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)
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?
O and 0 are very similar in lots of typefaces. And I and l and 1. Even u and v. Your brain's pretty good at figuring it out. Context helps a lot.
yeah I can read it ok
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
I can't really read anything with that, so somewhat readable is very moot.
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.
The thing to do with a 3x5 font is to make the capital N into a giant lowercase n. Then M H and W all become similar letters, just with a different location for the horizontal bar.
That's one of the possibilities, but one can also use asymmetry to evoke an illusion of diagonality, as in this font:
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1426620/3x6-pixel...
Is it just me or the s Z and z S should be swapped?
Love this. Brings so much joy. Try some punctuation. Hilarity ensues.
Cool. I hate it.