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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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)
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?
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"
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.
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
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.
Also https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font
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.
This is like claiming that Esperanto is a font
That's not a font though. It's...well, a code.
Bad kerning on that font would be incredibly problematic though.
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?
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.
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 .
> 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.
No, small LED displays with like 25 ppi. Think arduino/embedded.
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.
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.
Most letters are 2x3 px, the letter m is even 2x5. And I wouldn't say that I could comfortably read this, it was closer to deciphering than reading.
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.
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.
[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4000080/Timex/Tasword_...
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.
Similar to VIP Term on the Commodore 64, which used a 3x7 bitmap font in a 4x8 space to display 80-column text.
I don't know is any word processors did that, though, except in printer preview mode.
finally, my vim window can hold 200+ lines on my laptop screen!
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.
I'm blown away. I'd have sworn that wasn't possible. It's brilliant. Bravo.
Capital H is cursed... unconnected pixels, indistinguishable from 'ii' or "II". The concept's cool, but for this one point the wrong choice was made.
Try reading "HiGh sky buys The lies" in the font. Pretty difficult to make out what it says...
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.
I'm more concerned about V X Y all being identical.
How will I know if it's waxy or wavy?
Like all of language: context.
Why would hair be like 80s synthpop, or potatoes be in any way related to a by-product of honey?
Hair can be either waxy or wavy or both.
Her long blond waxy hair blew in the wind.
Context.
Her wa[]y hair was a challenge for the hairdresser
I'm not saying the context always disambiguates it. You can have ambiguous sentences even with perfect fonts.
The judge delivered an ambiguous sentence.
> Her long blond waxy hair blew in the wind.
Same question as GP - how can you tell if that was meant to be waxy or wavy?
From the context. Long hair blowing in the wind is a description of beautiful hair. Wavy hair is beautiful; waxy hair is not.
This is very obvious to most people.
"I'll have you know that some people find waxy hair beautifully therefore your example is invalid and I am very intelligent"
:nerd:
Meanwhile, 3x5 fonts are actually usable.
I’m a fan of “Tom Thumb” for small OLED displays. https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html
I wrote a kinda goofy Ada library for it https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/tiny_text
Yep, and very easy to read on low resolution. Master Of Orion have 3x5 fonts and they are very clear and easy to read.
Trying to read the text produced by this font makes my brain hurt
I wonder what the minimum resolution of Chinese characters is. It’s definitely more than 2px tall.
Apparently 8x8, for most characters traditional Chinese characters: https://imgur.com/DBRSqIn
Probably lower for simplified Chinese and katakana/hiragana Japanese characters.
I'd say that at 2x2, "Two Slice" is definitely not readable.
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.
5x7(7x5) is smallest I could find for Japanese, it probably won't work for actual Chinese language though
https://booth.pm/ja/items/1477300
X has had a 2 pixel bitmap font, `nil2`, from time immemorial (i.e. it's in X10).
Wow, can't be used as a braille alternative that people with sight can also understand?
It can be used as a braille alternative that blind people can't even read.
Observation:
Braille is 3 px in height. But only 2 px wide and monospaced, while this font is variable width.
Oh, and several characters share representation in this, say other threads here.
I eagerly await the use of this font in Microsoft’s new EULA
Very cool - note that lowercase b, l and h are the same
Really like that zero glyph. I wonder if, instead of Roman numerals, one could use ligatures to encode numeric strings as binary… 42 as 010101
(I sort of randomly picked 42, didn't know it was such an interesting string… Douglas Adams must have known that)
101010 - I'm guessing you know, and want to find out how long it takes for someone to notice and respond.
ah, I never actually bothered to read up on binary notation. I only know it via party tricks (counting to a thousand on two hands)
little endian vs big endian.
Also, typing it out while you run the algo in your head: 42 even -> 0, 21 odd -> 1, 10 even -> 0, 5 odd -> 1, 2 even -> 0, 1 odd -> 1.
Wonder if any OCR implementations can read it!
I was so confused why "o" in the example was wider than "o" written myself - until I understood that example has it capitalized... That seems useless
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?
> You can probably read this, even if you wish you couldn't.
Um... Nope. I can't.
I can get some of the letters, but not most of them, unfortunately.
Love the concept, and the art, that goes into things like this. But I just cannot read it.*
* I have nerve problems in my eyes. I'm not legally blind... Most of the time.
Yeah, a lot of words/letters made sense, but I definitely had to use some deduction to read it.
Interesting, and given the limitation, it’s quite impressive.
But I think “probably” is optimistic. I’d say “possibly” is more realistic.
It's not easy but I definitely could read it. It's easier if you don't try and read each word fully before continuing.
I wish I had this back capability when I used to program my TI graphing calculators back in highschool!
I wonder if it's possible to train to read text encoded as one colored pixel per letter, or even per token.
Given how people can learn languages, absolutely yes.
Abomination. I love it!
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)
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)
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?
O and 0 are very similar in lots of typefaces. And I and l and 1. Even u and v. Your brain's pretty good at figuring it out. Context helps a lot.
yeah I can read it ok
Pity there's no italics ...
SCNR
A thread last year with lots of related subpixel type things:
Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase (2015)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39735675
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"
It is readable in English with quite some training and context. Many characters have the same representation.
I for one would say this is not generally usable and has a limited scope.
Interesting nonetheless.
It says in all caps: “YOU CAN PROBABLY READ THIS, EVEN IF YOU WISH YOU COULDN'T. IT TENDS TO BE EASIER TO READ AT SMALLER SIZES.”
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.
That's one of the possibilities, but one can also use asymmetry to evoke an illusion of diagonality, as in this font:
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1426620/3x6-pixel...
I can't really read anything with that, so somewhat readable is very moot.
Thanks, I hate it.
Is it just me or the s Z and z S should be swapped?
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
Now do 1 px.
Love this. Brings so much joy. Try some punctuation. Hilarity ensues.
Cool. I hate it.