6 ms·

I don't really see the need to use a pixel font when printing to paper. It's not like a piece of paper has a given grid that must be followed like a monitor (w

by jeff18 17y ago

I don't really see the need to use a pixel font when printing to paper. It's not like a piece of paper has a given grid that must be followed like a monitor (which is not totally true, given sub-pixel anti-aliasing on LCDs). This might be a dumb question, but why not just take a regular font and shrink it to the same size as the pixel font, and print that, assuming you're not using an old dot-matrix printer? In other words, why limit yourself to those 8 bits?

DougWebb 17y ago
Most printing technologies still work with dots: dots of ink, dots of toner, dots of wax. You can get greyscale by varying the amount of stuff in a dot, which generally will make the dot bigger or smaller without changing its actual color. You can also get variations by using different colors of ink/toner/wax for different dots, or mixed in the same dot. For very-long-term archival, these variations are probably too subtle and too likely to be lost over time. A black and white pattern of dots will probably last a lot longer and be easier to interpret than slight variations in size and/or shade of the dots.