9 ms·
Smallest Typeface
- simantel 3y agoNot sure I'd be able to read this without context off the bat (especially the E, G, M, and W), but it's an interesting project!
- antihipocrat 3y agoThe number 8 is very ambiguous as well.
- globalnode 3y agoi like it!
- tail_exchange 3y agoAny samples with this font? I'd love to see it in action even if it's impossible to read.
- Cannabat 3y agoCheck out the album cover of Sheath by LFO (as mentioned on the page). Great IDM album.
- SushiHippie 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheath_(album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheath_(album)
- Herodotus38 3y agoPretty great. I only saw s and 5, as well as q and 9 were the same symbols.
- Waterluvian 3y agoO and 0. Z and 2.
- Herodotus38 3y agoThanks, even though I tried to not look foolish I missed those two for some reason
- Waterluvian 3y agoAt some point in my 30s I decided to stop trying to not look foolish. I highly recommended it. :)
- Kerrick 3y agoA similar concept for print: the Miniscule family, supposedly legible down to 2pt. https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/minuscule/ https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/minuscule/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lagrange77 3y agoHopefully the opt-out button and disclaimer designers won't discover this.
- ourmandave 3y agoThey're already in talks with Ant Man and Dr. Pym about a Quantum Realm font.
- modeless 3y agoAnyone have some text set in this font so we can all see how easy it is to read? On my MacBook Air 13" seems like you could fit 640*400 = 256000 characters at once. Which ought to fit, for example, the complete text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
- pushfoo 3y agoIf you can spare extra pixels, Tom Thumb (3x5) [1] is more legible. The upper case M and N are somewhat hard to distinguish without context, but it's the only major flaw compared to this one. Tom Thumb is also Public Domain (CC0). [1] https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html
- CharlesW 3y agoWonderful! To me, this is the smallest usable (vs. novelty) bitmapped font. [EDIT: Deleted “2-bit” silliness.]
- xanderlewis 3y agoWhat makes it 2-bit rather than 1-bit?
- CharlesW 3y agoDoh! Thank you, comment updated.
- kube-system 3y agoFYI: all typefaces (e.g. bitmap fonts) are de facto public domain in the US. (unless they've been design patented) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
- eru 3y agoIt's one of those weird exceptions that legal systems are full of. (There might be good reasons for this particular loophole, just like there are good reasons for any other loophole, if you dig deep enough. But the total sum makes for an overly complicated system.)
- kube-system 3y ago
- fimdomeio 3y agoFor anyone thinking about using this: At some point I tried to do a logo for myself on a 3x3 grid (so pretty much the same as this) and while the text was perfectly readable to me a few people I tested it with couldn't read it.
- elpocko 3y agoS and 5 are identical, as are Z and 2, and O and 0 (edit: and Q and 9). No punctuation either; semicolon vs. colon vs. exclamation mark needs creativity. There's no hope for $ or *.
- arp242 3y agoObviously a 3x3 typeface explicitly designed to be as small as possible comes with some trade-offs... And this is more of an art project than anything else.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago0 and O is same.
- layer8 3y agoWith subpixel rendering you could get down to 1x3 (or at least 2x3). ;)
- rafabulsing 3y agoSee Millitext: http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/
- SCLeo 3y agoOh wow, this is probably the most creative thing I have seen for a while. Thanks for sharing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NetOpWibby 3y agoThis is nuts wtf
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- karaterobot 3y agoNot totally sure what I'd use this for. Silkscreen is bigger, but is a lot more legible at small sizes. https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Silkscreen https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Silkscreen
- eru 3y agoThe font in the submission isn't meant to be readable in small physical sizes. It's just meant to use as few pixels as possible. A font with a higher resolution, ie more pixels or finer coordinates for a vector based one, has a chance to be more readable at smaller physical sizes. > Not totally sure what I'd use this for. It's mostly just for fun and artistic expression. The linked article mentions the font being used for some album covers.
- tzs 3y agoI used a 3 pixel wide font extensively back on the '80s to write debug messages to Mac screens from code that could not make use of the normal Mac ROM and OS display functions. At first this was when writing SCSI disk drivers for a third party Mac disk maker. Later it was when writing network drivers for a company making a SCSI ethernet interface. Then it was when working on firmware for some NuBUS cards for Mac II. I didn't want to write a full BITBLT, but I didn't want to make width + spacing be 8 pixels because even though that would be very easy it would also mean I could only have 64 characters to a line on the Mac or Mac Plus (512 x 342 display). With characters 3 pixels wide and 1 space between them you just need a simple BITBLT that only has to handle two cases. My font was 3x5. Unlike the other 3x5 fonts people have mentioned I didn't try to include lower case. Here's a sample, scaled up by factor of 4: https://imgur.com/a/I97Zi6l https://imgur.com/a/I97Zi6l The reason that there is a prominent visible symbol for newline is because when the debug print got to the bottom of the screen it would wrap back to the top. The prominent newline let you tell which characters on the line came from the latest print on that line.
- shagie 3y agoI used a font similar to this one when watching log files on an xterm back in the '90s and screen space was valuable. Its not "I want to read the lines as they go past" but rather "I want to get a feel for the rate of the lines as they go past and see the 'shape' of the lines". For an access log, regular use looks very different than someone trying to probe the site and that can be determined by the shape of the line - not the text itself. For that, if you wanted to see what was going on, a quick copy and paste of the text into a regular editor will show you the characters at a reasonable size.
- xarope 3y agoreminds me of the time I'd have the smallest font possible running in xwindows with a server log scrolling in it. I was so used to the pattern of the logs, I'd only need to see a change in said pattern to know something was wrong. this would probably have beaten that smallest font back then
- userbinator 3y agoThat's 9 bits, or 512 total combinations in that grid; thus, theoretically one should be able to fit all of ASCII, but many of the characters would be very difficult to distinguish or recognise. (Incidentally, a common 7-segment display can also fit all of ASCII, and if you include a decimal point too, can represent a single byte completely: https://dkeenan.com/7-segment%20ASCII%20characters.txt https://dkeenan.com/7-segment%20ASCII%20characters.txt )
- klyrs 3y agoWait til that they figure out that braille is only 3x2...
- eru 3y agoYes, but braille uses the equivalent of BCD, doesn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asylteltine 3y agoWhy isn’t the M missing the top center pixel? Seems like it would make it way easier to read
- avmich 3y agoI think this is a more elaborate approach. https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4 https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4
- wonger_ 3y agoI threw together a figlet font for this typeface, with a preview, here: https://wonger.dev/posts/monospace-dump#creations https://wonger.dev/posts/monospace-dump#creations It won't render nice here because of line spacing and unicode but it should work fine in the terminal. See also another 3x3 font and someone else's figlet port of that one: https://fakoo.de/en/fakoo/fakoo-ttf.html https://fakoo.de/en/fakoo/fakoo-ttf.html https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/2021/05/18/3x3-typeface/ https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/2021/05/18/3x3-typeface/
- kragen 3y agothis is actually 4×4 if you're counting pixels needed on the output device instead of rom space needed; another, more comprehensive font of the same size is https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4 https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4 the same problem happens with the public-domain 'tom thumb' font pushfoo linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38800409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38800409. it is actually 4×6 (24 output pixels) but claims to be 3×5 it can be accessed despite tls problems at http://web.archive.org/web/20230828193815/https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230828193815/https://robey.lag.... but says 'Please do not post this article to Hacker News.' my own 4×6 font is demonstrated at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dofonts-1k.html http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dofonts-1k.html, where it fits into a 1024-byte web page along with all the logic needed to render ascii text with it; but the proportional font i used in http://canonical.org/~kragen/bible-columns http://canonical.org/~kragen/bible-columns (rendered with http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/propfontrender.py http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/propfontr...) is at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/6-pixel-1-bit-proportional-font.png http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/6-pixel-1... and is slightly smaller; it averages 21.5 pixels per character. this is more than anders de flon's so-called 3×3, which is 16 pixels per character, but it supports the full character set, if you think ascii is the full character set anyway. so does simplifier's 4×4 font i think you could do better by using grayscale for antialiasing, and as rafabulsing pointed out, matt sarnoff's millitext http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ uses subpixel antialiasing to get very readable text at 1⅔×5 pixels
- tom_ 3y agoThe Atari ST came with a 6x6 font, including spacing: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/876150/atari_st_6 https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/876150/atari_st_6 - 5x5 means no compromises required for upper case letters, which are all readable, and punctuation is intelligible. The liberties taken with lower case are probably acceptable. (Been years since I saw this font in situ so I'm not sure what it'd look like if you have two adjacent rows of text! Probably mostly OK, but I bet some letters would meet. The ST's OS used this font for icon labels, so there was always a gap.)
- 3y ago
- nelox 3y agoI blame Adobe, Microsoft and Apple for the common misuse of font instead of typeface.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoThe distiction was rather made obsolete due to the digital typography instead.
- evertedsphere 3y agoDoes anyone remember that one weird block script that people post to HN sometimes? The only thing I remember is that it's the kind of thing that would take a good while to learn to read—maybe the blocks for the letters in a word could be recognised as a single shape when juxtaposed?
- sp332 3y agoThe only one I remember is Flea's Knees, which uses specific colors for each pixel and depends on the RGB layout of LCD subpixels to effectively triple the horizontal resolution. The letters are 4 pixels wide and relatively very tall.
- kbaker 3y agohttps://dotsies.org/ https://dotsies.org/ maybe?
- evertedsphere 3y agoYes! Thank you.
- justinl33 3y agoIn an ideal world where people are fluent in binary, we would only need 5 pixels. Just imagine how efficient the world could be…
- charcircuit 3y agoThe binary of each pixel on a typical display contains 24 bits which is already plenty to encode the alphabet.
- phantomathkg 3y agoBut not CJK characters...
- charcircuit 3y agoln(50000+40000+25000)/ln(2) < 17 CJK comfortably fits
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- uxp8u61q 3y ago2^24 is equal to 16,777,216. There are only about 100,000 CJK characters in Unicode, for example.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shpx 3y agoSmallest monospace typeface. You could make "I" and "1" a single line and make "J"/"L" and "P"/"Q" only 2 pixels wide.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2005)
- seba_dos1 3y agoDamn, I'm pretty sure I did something similar on a piece of paper when I was a kid. I could have been the "creator of the world's smallest typeface"!
- divbzero 3y ago3×3 pixels is almost certainly the smallest legible font. You need at least 6 pixels to encode 27 letters + 10 digits because: 2⁵ < 37 2⁶ > 37 But 2×3 pixels seems unlikely to be legible. From 2×3 pixels, you can increment the height to 2×4 pixels or the width to 3×3 pixels. The latter feels more feasible.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago> From 2×3 pixels, you can increment the height to 2×4 pixels or the width to 3×3 pixels. These are not the only possibilities. It might be possible to lay two adjacent letters into a block of 2x5 or 5x3 pixels as well.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoWorld's smallest typeface for 36 alphanumeric characters, to be exact. :-) There are some small typefaces for other scripts; my go-to example is the Misaki font [1] that supports all JIS X 0208 character within 8x8 pixels (spacing included, and most glyphs are within 7x7 bounds). It is incredibly hard to recognize some individual characters at this size, but the overall text is surprisingly readable. [1] https://littlelimit.net/misaki.htm https://littlelimit.net/misaki.htm
- mgoetzke 3y agoDidn't everyone do this exact font in the 80s when we did not have enough room and needed something for eg debug output on our computers ?
- zserge 3y agoA while ago I created an even smaller typeface (2x3) but that is barely readable without memorising certain glyphs: https://zserge.com/posts/tiny-font/ https://zserge.com/posts/tiny-font/
- navane 3y agoIf anything it shows a lower bound; 2x3 does not provide legible letters.
- zozbot234 3y agoThe 2x3 case is very interesting though, because it's the basic size of a Braille cell. (2x4 Braille also exists, but it does not help readability all that much here.) So you could read this font on a Braille device without knowing the actual Braille script. Louis Braille actually invented his own 10px bitmap font for mixed visual-tactile use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapoint It fell out of use after typewriters were introduced.
- andsoitis 3y agoSome observations: - 5 and S are indistinguishable - 0 and O are indistinguishable - 2 and Z are indistinguishable - no lowercase While context will generally suffice in making the indistinguishable glyphs understood correctly, there are some use cases where we mix letters and numbers in the same string and those would be ambiguous.
- monokai_nl 3y agoI took a slightly different approach, while also using a 3×3 grid. It's explained here: https://minimalwim.com https://minimalwim.com It's more of a typographic concept than being fit for actual use, but it was interesting to explore creating a font within a tight set of constraints.
- spiritplumber 3y agoThe first two Wing Commander games were great at this. You could read everything and it was still tiny.
- RpFLCL 3y agoI recently put together some very small fonts (3x3, 3x4, 3x5, 3x6, 4x4, and 5x5) and tried to enumerate most of the possible glyphs as part of working on little projects on SSD1306 OLED screens: https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tiny-pixel-art-fonts/ https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tiny-pixel-art-fonts/
- fsckboy 3y agowow, those are really readable! slightly tangential, but thank you! for the first time ever, the word "font" has been the appropriate word choice in the title, and we got a "typeface" claim. When I read it, I immediately thought a braille typeface has a good claim on being the smallest. Would there be anything "enjoyable" to a blind person for a braille typeface to be available in different fonts? Italics? little tear drops, that sort of thing?
- patrakov 3y agoMy questions would be: is it possible to improve the visual results if we lift the restriction to only two levels of brightness of each pixel? I.e., would a use of proper grayscale allow creation of smaller fonts that are still readable, or allow more visually distinct and recognizable characters, than a binary font of the same size can have? Would designing a proportional typeface, as opposed to a monospaced one, help with minimizing the average advance width of the glyphs (averaged according to their frequencies in English text)? Motivation: it is possible to reduce a book page, with ~80 characters per line, without any font hinting, without using any special fonts, using just common image manipulation tools, to just 240 pixels wide, and still get mostly readable words (but not individual letters). This is 3 horizontal pixels per glyph on average, including the gap - something that the demonstrated binary bitmap fonts don't achieve. Example: https://imgur.com/a/AlYrnSS https://imgur.com/a/AlYrnSS
- lencastre 3y agoTry mouse, the smallest pixel font that is surprisingly readable at really small font sizes.