Comment by K0balt
1 day ago
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.
Glyph advance or line spacing is not part of the bitmaps.
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.
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