Comment by JdeBP
5 months ago
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.
5 months ago
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 can think of a font that’s only 1 pixel high. Invented by Samuel Morse, takes a bit of practice to read :)
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.
What is a typeface if not a specification for pixel encoding of text? You put text into the typeface, and you get pixel data out of it.
Ah the internet where you can make a lighthearted joke and immediately get um-actually'd by multiple people.
I really thought the :) at the end would be enough.
You do realize that you can't represent a glyph with only 2 pixels ?
Bad kerning on that font would be incredibly problematic though.
That's not a font though. It's...well, a code.
Well explain this then! https://www.dafont.com/morse.font
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This is like claiming that Esperanto is a font
Somehow, this feels like a good description for how William Shatner speaks Esperanto.
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?
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 .
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).
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
That's really interesting, for me it was the other way around.
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!
is there one that is 3 pixels? feel like 2 is just overly minimal haha
Yes. See the Micro-Font Quilt (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236312) which considered three (mostly) 3 pixel-high fonts.
> 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.
I just did some code to display digits on my APC Mini's 8x8 light grid: https://github.com/scottyeager/pressed/blob/main/controllers...
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.
Thanks for the tip on Mystrix—looks neat.
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No, small LED displays with like 25 ppi. Think arduino/embedded.