Comment by berkes
2 years ago
"readable". I'm 45, been looking at screens for 30+ years almost daily now. There's no way I can read that with or without my glasses.
It's truly impressive feat to get it this small. I used to do texts like this, often manually, pixel by pixel. For websites and games, it was all the rage back in late nineties early 2000s.
But only now I start to truly understand,by experiencing first-hand, why accessibility matters. This font is awesome, but terrible for any kind of accessibility.
I guess it's only meant for devices with (a smaller number of) large pixels. Your HiDPI monitor or retina iPhone screen will not be a good match.
Possibly. The author mentions a few other uses under "Practicality":
> Once the novelty wears off a "practical" example would be rendering "in-game book pages" that don't look like complete gibberish, or an "accurate print preview" with real text instead of blurry placeholder pixels that don't even look close to being the glyphs scaled down.
There's also the question if "readable" means just seeing the pixels as opposed to recognizing the glyph. Some people may just consider the recognizing the edges of the glyph as enough to consider it as being read but readability is strongly related to the ability to understand the text and its meaning.
The lower case letters can mostly be read just in context. Looking at the characters here [0] 'g' is just a vertical solid rectangle and 's' is two diagonal pixels. 'W' looks more like an 'M' than the actual M letter.
[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Michaelangel007/nanofont3x...
This seems to be a problem of screen resolution, not font. The number of pixels of the font doesn't have to relate to the size on your monitor at all.
I also can't read it at 100% on a high-density monitor, but I can read it very comfortably at a normal size, even though glyphs have so few features.
Screen resolution is literally the amount of pixels that fit on a square inch.
Not that's density, measured in dpi (dots per inch).
You wouldn't say that Super Mario is unplayable because it's too tiny at 256x224. You would just have you 4k TV show big pixels and get on with the game.
I'm younger than you and I still can't read it at all :OOOOOOOOOOOOOO
It's surprisingly readable if I zoom into the images. On 100% it's too small for me, but a modern computer or smartphone screen is probably not the use case.
I find the all uppercase version to be more or less readable when zoomed in -- although I don't think the Declaration of Independence was really referring to "Nature's DOD" (the D and G are nearly identical) but I find the lower case version to be completely unreadable.