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.
That’s really more of an encoding than a typeface. Like ASCII and Unicode.
But I guess if you can build fonts that generate barcodes, and fonts that have LLMs built in, then you could design a 1 pixel high font that uses Morse code to represent most ASCII characters.
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.
With the gap, it's effectively three pixels wide. Basically a 3x5 font with one pixel chopped off.
On some displays, you can also divide RGB into three subpixels (R, G, and B stripes). A 3x5 pixel font (9x5 subpixels) can be drawn as a 6x5 subpixel font instead (a 2x5 pixel font).
Not sure about one font vs the other, but that one seems easiest to read from a highly oblique angle since that makes it look more similar to what it would do if half wasn't missing... Unless I'm just gaslighting myself and find it easier to read that way because I was expecting that it would be easier!
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.
By using the three available colors on my older model, I was able to render numbers up to 199 in a readable way. Two digits on the right are 8x3 and one on the left is 8x2. I quickly abandoned two pixels of width as impossible for making legible text for all digits, so seeing a full font at two pixels wide is a fun surprise.
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.
I think it's partly because we recognize letters, and whole words, by glyph shape more than specific identity. Obviously a 2x2 grid can only depict 16 different patterns, but we're trying to recognize whole words, not arbitrary letter sequences, and the sequence of shapes (hence letter possibilities) is evidentially enough, a bit like reading crappy handwriting.
It's interesting how we can do this with this 2x2 font immediately without any training, but I suppose reading in general has provided enough training, and ability to read this 2x2 font just provides some insight as to how word perception works.
True, but it's interesting that we can quickly decipher/read it at all. It seems to be a typical case of human perception where top-down prediction (maybe of visual word forms?) meets bottom-up sensory input, and we've gained enough experience of this (reading different fonts, handwriting, various lighting, etc) that this particular type of impoverished input doesn't pose much challenge.
I believe it's in part because of our experience reading things at angles. In this case, it looks to me like letters tilted backwards on a table, and I'm peering at them just above their horizon. Legible, but not comfortable.
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.
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.
I get that, but it figures in when you actually put this on pixels. I’m thinking about practical use of such a font, most likely on a pixel-constrained screen, otherwise you would use a higher definition font.
It’s a cool hack, and for someone actually using little fonts like I do in real world devices it’s very interesting.
I find that you can actually go 4x5 (including padding) and still have great readability. Any less and you have to work to read it.
By this definition every n x n font is actually (n + 1) x (n + 1), but that isn’t the convention and fonts are never displayed with 0px vertical or horizontal spacing between letters.
Early computers usually displayed characters directly mapped to the screen, with no space between them. There wasn’t enough memory to store a bit for each pixel, so they stored only the characters and wrote them out one line at a time from the ROM character map. Sometimes, you could define a few characters in RAM as well. Then if you were lucky there were “sprites”, characters that could be mapped at arbitrary alignments and sometimes even rotations “on top of” the existing character map.
This is how you got a 32x64 display (often only 32x32) mapped into 2k of RAM, instead of the 16k it would take if the pixels were stored— a time when 8k RAM total was pretty standard, and 16k was a lot. Then, color became a thing and ate up a lot of memory, so even with 64k nobody was generally mapping fonts onto a pixel background. That’s why you switched to graphics modes etc.
This is also why you will find a bunch of 8x8 pixel fonts out there that have blank rows and columns built into them for spacing. It’s still very common for imbedded work, where you often have screen sizes like 64x128 and other small pixel counts, when you are trying for maximum readable density.
You can still find these fonts in the text-only display modes when you are in the POST routines off many PCs, if you unhide them in the bios…. But many BIOSs are graphics mode only now so even that is getting hard to find. Still there when booting Linux though, if you escape out of the splash screen.
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.
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)
8x8 for Chinese is difficult, but I think it’s a bit less guesswork than 2px high for English. I wonder what simplified Chinese would look like 6px tall.
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"
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?
With narrow spacing and poor kerning it can get much worse, especially if you're reading printed text; I've seen some extremely bad fonts used in print, (usually in italics or titles, but sometimes in the body text as well):
m and rn, cl and d, lo and b, jo and p, ijl1, GC0OQ, italic Q2.
You're right. The capitals look fine, but the lowercased versions look swapped. I think this is because the creator decided to cut the spines for the uppercases and crop out the arms for lowercases. Since the arms and spine point in opposite directions for "s" and "z", it really hurts their identification
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.
Also https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font