Comment by sxp
2 years ago
If you're interested in other tiny fonts:
- PICO-8's 3x5 font with support for programming characters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127419 has more examples.
2 years ago
If you're interested in other tiny fonts:
- PICO-8's 3x5 font with support for programming characters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127419 has more examples.
3x4 = 12 bits
52 upper/lower case letters + 10 numerals ≈ 64 = 6 bits
It's kind of amazing that the overhead is only a factor of 2 to literally read BINARY data with my eyes.
And that a 1bpp uncompressed image of a piece of text can be only 50% larger in file size than its .txt file and be readable.
Readability is in your own eyes.
What it is readable for you, is not for me.
Just map lower case to uppercase and replace any non alpha-num to a black square. This font is not for general use but just to squeeze text messages on tiny displays.
TBH, I see all this pretty useless. While still interesting enough.
I'd say it's probably actually useful if you want to cram a lot of debugging info on a display like this for a small IOT device or something in the field.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3527
Does this mean that ASCII / the Latin alphabet, is actually pretty good :-)
obviously 8x8 is comparably enormous but https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/ has a great collection of fonts
Also; if you really, really want the old-skool feel of the Trident 8900 SVGA card you had in your early 90s PC-compatible, or your Toshiba laptop from the same period:
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
Theres also the wonderful "Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type" by Toshi Omigari which has pages and pages of fonts used in arcade games, sorted by style, most of which are 8x8
A favorite of mine is the MonteCarlo Programmer Font [0]. I used it as my terminal font for a couple years.
[0] https://www.bok.net/MonteCarlo/
It looks like it's been iterated on quite a few times. Here's an active descendant project, for anyone that might be interested: https://github.com/sunaku/tamzen-font
I didn't know about this, thanks for sharing!
I'm glad you linked to one with subpixel rendering.
Considering that when we view text on a modern display we're almost always seeing anti-aliased grayscale pixels with subpixel rendering, it doesn't make sense to me that you'd design a font that doesn't take advantage of that.
Why not even grayscale? Surely a few of the letters could be improved by using a pixel other than pure black or pure white?
I believe mine, while very incomplete, given some practice, is the most readable of the lot.
http://synesthesia.go-here.nl
Of related interest, the smallest grid needed for Simplified Chinese is 8x8:
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pix...
I like Tom Thumb: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1656341/tom-thumb
Mouse TTF