7 ms·

5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens

822 points by zdw 6mo ago

parlortricks 6mo ago
This is great, i use a 3x3 font i drew up for lowres games, though there are many example that look mostly the same since it is such a small space.
lostmsu 6mo ago
Small g is unreadable. I obviously know the alphabet and despite that it took quite some time to understand what letter is that.
- bartvk 6mo ago
  Perhaps they should've used something similar to the 9. However then it wouldn't really look like a lower-case g.
  - antraip 6mo ago
    Here is how I would personally modify lowercase g: xxx x x xxxxx x xxxx It looks a bit like a 9 but the descender is different. (Could play around with how many x's to put on the first and third lines, particularly whether to set the first/last bits on those lines as "corners" or make it more rounded.) I would also modify the top of lowercase e in a similar fashion.
    - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
      I might do something like this instead: xx x x xx x x xx A little awkward, but very distinct from the 9. The reason to narrow the head of it is to allow the end of the descender to rise upwards without turning it into an 8.
- eichin 6mo ago
  From using Okidata printers back in the day, a "tall" lower case g really does look bad in running text. (The similarity to the e is a little troublesome, but I don't have a fix for that...)
ramses0 6mo ago
...and don't forget "twoslice": https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html I haven't done the pixel-by-pixel deviation checking, but they may be comparable and independently derived!
- Nnnes 6mo ago
  See also Picket Right, 2 pixels wide (7 high) and still readable: https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font
- graybeardhacker 6mo ago
  Can people read that? I want to do a study to see the cognitive difference between people who can read that and those who can't. I can't at all.
  - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
    I could read every word at nearly full speed, with the exception of "tends" that required a lot of puzzling out. But I'm backfilling a lot of information from context, the same way that this works: https://www.dictionary.com/articles/typoglycemia https://www.dictionary.com/articles/typoglycemia It would have been much harder to read a series of random words, or another piece of text with a less predictable structure.
  - GaryBluto 6mo ago
    I tried copying a random line of text, pasted it into the textbox and could read most of it. Only a few words tripped me up.
dfox 6mo ago
IIRC the really cheap Casio Organizers/DataBanks of 90's used 5x5 font. And then my ex used something like that on linux in order to fit a ridiculous amount of xterms onto 14" CRT (somewhat absurd feat with her congenital vision defect).
IvanK_net 6mo ago
Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already. It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).
- JoshTriplett 6mo ago
  > Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfal12856a00151b-128x56-transparent-oled-screen https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfal12856a00151b-128x56... - 128x56 https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfag12864u4nfi-128x64-transparent-graphic-lcd-display https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfag12864u4nfi-128x64-t... - 128x64 There's a whole world of embedded devices with wide varieties of screen resolutions.
  - IvanK_net 6mo ago
    That is not a tiny screen, it has over 7 thousand pixels. I think you will not be able to read 5x5 pixel letters on that display (a letter would be about 1 mm tall).
    - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
      0.27mm dot pitch, so each letter would be 1.35mm square in a box of 1.62mm square. I expect I could read it just fine at the distances I'd expect to look at such a screen. I tested this on a phone, and was able to read it without much difficulty at roughly 18-30 inches.
    - ranger_danger 6mo ago
      What is your definition of a tiny screen?
- compiler-guy 6mo ago
  Quick browsing at adafruit.com (or any other similar vendor), reveals plenty of displays that are 128, 240, and 320 pixels wide. At 6 pixels of width per character, that's only 21, 40, and 53 characters wide. Seems quite useful to me. There are also several 32x32 led panels, which one could imagine needing some text. Also, this kind of thing is just interesting, regardless of the usefulness.
JoshTriplett 6mo ago
These look great. I would have loved to have seen a sample of the 4x5, not just the 5x5.
DonThomasitos 6mo ago
Incomplete blog post! Where was the comparison vs. a 1x1 pixel font?
FelipeCortez 6mo ago
1x5 can also work if you take advantage of subpixel rendering https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/
- rossant 6mo ago
  Whoa, amazing!
- dorianmariecom 6mo ago
  "if you look closely at the screen"
  - Tade0 6mo ago
    My child has one of those "Kids' microscopes": https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kids'-Microscopes/zgbs/toys-and-games/166306011 https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kids'-Microscopes/zgbs/t... Magnification is around 5x, but this is more than enough to see subpixels.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- JohnDotAwesome 6mo ago
  Amazing. I zoomed in with my phone on the generated image and was surprised to see I could just make out the text! https://storage.j0.hn/subpixelfont.png https://storage.j0.hn/subpixelfont.png - Also wow my screen is dirty af
  - jkonline 6mo ago
    Suggest you check your .htaccess (or however you secure your server) for storage.j0.hn.
- throwaway27448 6mo ago
  It seems like you need 2x5 for legibility
- 6mo ago
iamjackg 6mo ago
I actually thought of this (or a previous similar project? The one posted here seems more recent...) just a few days ago while watching the announcement video for this new DJ device, since it seems to use a 5x5 font: https://driftdj.com/dj-hybrid https://driftdj.com/dj-hybrid
- botanrice 6mo ago
  yo! thanks for sharing, this is a wicked cool device. I've always wanted a "pocket" mixer to take with me on planes and trains. I know there are smaller devices that can perform that duty but their more like repurposed EQ or audio interfaces that can be used to mix. but wowza!! $900 for that lil guy, dang!
  - iamjackg 6mo ago
    I know, it looks incredible. It popped up on my YouTube feed and I got super excited, but then I thought "I bet this is going to be at least $800." I was wrong in the worst possible way.
    - botanrice 6mo ago
      I'm curious of the target audience with that price point. Wealthy hobbyists aside, any serious djays are not going to use that during a gig. Maybe as a novelty? Maybe they just haven't figured out how to scale, idk. Can't help but think if they could sell that for, idk, $300? even $400. You'd get all kinds of people using it in fun ways. -- ON another note, a few months back some guy posted here how he made a very simple midi device for his young daughter with a raspberry pi or the like. I do wonder if you could make a pocked-sized EQ-mixer with crossfade with this kind of interface. Do you know of anything like that?
bmurray7jhu 6mo ago
Similar discussion for CJK scripts https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pixel-resolution-needed-to-support-chinese https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pix...
soperj 6mo ago
If the author sees this. I think the lower case t would benefit from a pixel above the cross, similar to how the lower case k goes up one more pixel. It looks a lot like the capital T with how it is now. It is very well done though. Thanks for sharing.
- gpm 6mo ago
  I think I'd go with something like x xxx x xx
  - soperj 6mo ago
    didn't even think about the stem on the bottom. Originally I was thinking just the cross x xxx x x But I think you're right.
- usefulcat 6mo ago
  Agree about lowercase t. I was surprised the lowercase l didn't look more like xx x x x xx
kibwen 6mo ago
> 4x4: Not enough to draw "E", "M" or "W" properly. However, 5x5 isn't enough to draw "e" properly if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase, so you need at least 6 vertical pixels. And then that isn't enough to draw any character with a descender properly, so you need at least 7 vertical pixels (technically you should have 8 in order to allow "g" and "y" to have a distinct horizontal descender while still sitting on the baseline, but this is probably an acceptable compromise). And remember that in practice this means you will still need at least 8x6 pixels to draw each character, to allow for a visible gap between letters below and beside them.
- mulr00ney 6mo ago
  I think the `e` looks better in the 'real pixels' example they gave; I find my tends to 'fill in' the space of the top part of the letter, and I suspect in the context of a longer sentence it'd be pretty easy to parse. (but yeah, it's not quite right, and is especially jarring in the nice, clean, blown up pixels in the top example)
  - kibwen 6mo ago
    It definitely looks better in the second screenshot than the first, but you have to be very, very close to the screen in order to see individual pixels like that. And on low-res displays, which this sort of font might be necessary for, it's going to look somewhat different because low-res screens tend to be chosen for cheapness, and cheap screens tend to be monochrome, so none of that artistic fuzzy subpixel coloring.
  - benj111 6mo ago
    Was it intended that we should fill in the word 'mind' ourselves, to prove your point???
- JoshTriplett 6mo ago
  > if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase I think that's the least of the properties I'd be willing to sacrifice to have a font that tiny.
z2 6mo ago
The 3x2 is fascinating, it's the same resolution as braille, albeit rotated 90 degrees. I wonder if this could become a braille-like system that's both visually and finger-readable. Note: there are repeat glyphs here like c and o, though the example actually uses a different c somehow. But perhaps repeats are ok given context.
- 0110101001 6mo ago
  In the 2x2 resolution (which can't support all of Braille, but does support the first 10 characters), A, B, C, E, and F are all the recognizable Braille shapes for those letters (though in offset positions). At first, it seemed like an Easter egg, but it's probably just a natural happenstance of two people centuries apart deciding to represent the first ten letters of the alphabet in a 2x2 grid with a general idea to use fewer dots at the start than at the end.
damieng 6mo ago
You can get nicer 5x5 fonts amd it was not that uncommon back in the day. 4 wide is not too bad if you make the center of M and W just two pixels inset from top or bottom respectively or borrow the spacing column. Plenty of systems did it like CP/M on the Spectrum +3 and it looks pretty decent.
TruthSHIFT 6mo ago
Don't forget Jason Kottke's Silkscreen font: https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/ https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/
ghssds 6mo ago
You could do a bit better with a 4x5 font for every characters except M, W, m, and w which would be 5x5 but use the pixels normaly used to separate them from the next character, so every caracters still use the same width.
perarneng 6mo ago
If you start from the bottom of the page directly and scroll up then the 5x5 looks even better.
calebm 6mo ago
You could call it the "Minimum Viable Font"
rbanffy 6mo ago
One nice use for these tiny fonts is large text in terminals. Unicode now has 2x4 (from Kaypro), 2x3 (from Teletext, TRS-80), and 2x2 mosaic characters. Unicode also has 3x3 large text (from HP terminals) but font and terminal support is limited.
- kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
  I assume you mean Braille is the 2x4 set. What range introduces 3x3 codepoints?
  - rbanffy 6mo ago
    The 3x3 are the large text blocks - intended to use in 3x3 groups to form letters and numbers from the fragments in the range. There are 2x4 mosaics as well, separate from the Braille alphabet. These are symbols coming from legacy systems (such as the HP terminals and Kaypro CP/M machines).
akavel 6mo ago
See also u8g2 fonts: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/index.html https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/index.htm... (available also in original C at: https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall)
octagons 6mo ago
I developed a font with a similar resolution that was not nearly as legible for my Pi Zero with an e-ink screen many years ago. It allowed for similar tooling such as the flipper zero and esp32 marauder projects. I should fire that project up and implement this font…
- Footprint0521 6mo ago
  Dude I was thinking exactly that, might have to mod my f0 momentum firmware
onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago
I love the design of your website!
Dwedit 6mo ago
A 3x5 font does not sacrifice the M or W. H,M,W end up as similar looking characters, but the M has the center pixel one higher, and the W has the center pixel one lower.
thesuperevil 6mo ago
Gg
tliltocatl 6mo ago
At that point, just go Braille! Amazing work anyway.
ludocode 6mo ago
The 5x5 is very nice, and the 3x5 isn't bad either. Unfortunately neither of them have all of ASCII. The size is also a bit misleading because you need to add spacing so really they need a 6x6 or 4x6 grid. I'm quite fond of Spleen: https://github.com/fcambus/spleen https://github.com/fcambus/spleen It has a 5x8 font which has all of ASCII, but most glyphs are actually 4x8 and include horizontal spacing. I modified it to reduce the rest for a project I'm doing so all glyphs are 4x8. The result can be rendered on a 5x9 grid with a guaranteed line of horizontal and vertical spacing between all glyphs. It's very nice.
- RachelF 6mo ago
  In the early 1980s there were actually word processors for the Apple 2 which had a 40 column display (7 pixel wide fonts default) that gave 60 columns using the a 5x5 font in graphics mode. It was a selling point. The hardware solution was to buy an "80 column card" that gave 80 columns of proper text, if your monitor could handle it.
- tomtomtom777 6mo ago
  At 3x5 it states: > The "M", "W" and "Q" suffer, but it's still got a distinct O and zero. The Q is weird; I would think it makes more sense to draw it as a zero with the bottom right set.
dmitrygr 6mo ago
I have used this one before, it uses one fewer pixels per char: (4x6 = 24 < 25 = 5x5) https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1656341/tom-thumb https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1656341/tom-thumb
mikestew 6mo ago
"Images were displayed on an Apple 30" Cinema Display" Yowsa. For those playing at home, that monitor is over 20 years old: https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/apple_cinema_display_30.html https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...
GolfPopper 6mo ago
I didn't seen any mention of Tony Pai's quite good 3x3 font (only uppercase): https://tonypai.itch.io/3x3-pixel-font https://tonypai.itch.io/3x3-pixel-font
- throwaway287391 6mo ago
  A bunch of these appear to be 9x9-ish? (B, P, Q, R, Z, 0, most of the non-alphanumerics...)
ESMP 6mo ago
Wouldn't something like this be ideal for devices like Xteink X4?
- sbarre 6mo ago
  The resolution on my X4 is pretty decent, and regular fonts look just fine. I don't think there's a need for tiny fonts on an e-reader, even one with a small screen. IMO when you're reading a book I think you want to prioritize readability, not characters-per-page.
jh00ker 6mo ago
I always loved the 5x6 Pixel font in this classic 90s PC game: https://covertaction.fandom.com/wiki/Cryptography_(Mini-Game) https://covertaction.fandom.com/wiki/Cryptography_(Mini-Game... The extra 1 pixel of height for the text in green, in particular, allowed for some cool "italic" styling, especially for letters like E, D, J, U, V
pugworthy 6mo ago
CGA era developers are like, "Yea been there done that..."
- reaperducer 6mo ago
  And Commodore 64 people. VIP Term, and others, had 3x7 fonts on 4x8 grids to connect to 80-column mainframes.
mjaniczek 6mo ago
Oh cool, I have to try these fonts on my amber CRT getting commands from an Elm webapp ([demo](https://youtu.be/M9Q5tFPtGaA?t=121 https://youtu.be/M9Q5tFPtGaA?t=121), [code](https://github.com/Janiczek/crt-esp32-elm/tree/main/vdom/ https://github.com/Janiczek/crt-esp32-elm/tree/main/vdom/)) - there's not a lot of real estate in a 400x240 NTSC resolution. But the scanlined rendering has so much charm! EDIT: realized a better demo for this discussion would be the photos I took of all the tiny bitmap fonts I had converted to the C array style at the time. Thread has more but here are my favorites: https://bsky.app/profile/janiczek.cz/post/3mh25atboz224 https://bsky.app/profile/janiczek.cz/post/3mh25atboz224
namanvyas 6mo ago
I've used 3x5 fonts on a couple of embedded projects and honestly the biggest pain isn't the font itself, its getting the spacing right.
huydotnet 6mo ago
I'm gonna use this article to explain to my peers about LLM quantization!
- carlovalenti 6mo ago
  [dead]
Theodores 6mo ago
Many decades ago it was anti aliasing with MS clear type that made small text possible. Yet, before that, for regular TV, this had been worked out, so lots of text could be shown on things like business TV, in glorious analogue PAL or never twice same colour for Americans. Small text is an interesting problem, but we have moved on from pixels as useful units.
enriquto 6mo ago
This is cool, but my problem is the opposite: I have a modern laptop screen with tiny pixels. What I need is then a huge bitmap font... does anybody have any?
- frankling_ 6mo ago
  Here are a few made by upscaling and then manually cleaning up classic fonts: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI The glyph coverage is enough for most programming languages; missing glyphs just fall back to a pixelized look. Lode 1.5x works really well at 110 ppi displays, which seems to be the uncanny valley for antialiasing.
- sandos 6mo ago
  Why a bitmap font if you have tiny pixels? Just use a sharp font like Iosevka or similar.
  - enriquto 6mo ago
    i want all occurrences of the same glyph to be identical. This is essentially impossible to obtain with blurry "antialiased" fonts.
AvAn12 6mo ago
Like dot matrix printer fonts
patrakov 6mo ago
Using multi-level grayscale instead of just two pixel states, on and off, can produce readable text at even smaller font sizes. The catch is that I have to say "text", not "letters", i.e., rely on humans inferring the too-blurry letters from their context. And I do not even need a specially designed font for that. Example: https://imgur.com/a/text-80-characters-per-line-240-pixels-wide-AlYrnSS https://imgur.com/a/text-80-characters-per-line-240-pixels-w... That's 3 horizontal pixels per character on average, including inter-character spacing.
rahimnathwani 6mo ago
6×3 is also good (fits on a 7×4 grid). https://archive.org/details/zx_Tasword_2_Tutor_1983_Tasman_Software_a https://archive.org/details/zx_Tasword_2_Tutor_1983_Tasman_S...
russellbeattie 6mo ago
I think on my 6.8" WQHD+ 3200 x 1440 phone screen (70.5mm width), an actual 5x5 pixel square might be the size of a period → . Doing the math, 70.5mm / 1440px = 0.05mm per pixel, x5 = 0.25mm wide. Just a guess though, I'm not exactly sure how big a period is without a microscope.
chuckadams 6mo ago
Fonts like this are also great for huge screens like LED signage. Big pixels and very low resolution, so logically a tiny screen.
analog8374 6mo ago
i really like your website design
analog8374 6mo ago
bunk! he left out 1x1
hank808 6mo ago
Very cool for anyone with flawless eyesight!
anthk 6mo ago
I remember a weird font with a special alphabet made of dots or something like that. Not Braille, it was for fast reading or such.
SyzygyRhythm 6mo ago
The ship computers in the old game Privateer (and probably Wing Commander) had a pretty nice pixel font. Most of the characters were 3x4, but with a few niceties: descenders (j, p, q) could go below the normal outline, and wide glyphs like m/n/w were more than 3 pixels wide. Overall, pretty readable for uppercase/lowercase/numerics, and included a few "futuristic" touches.
davebren 6mo ago
Somewhat relevant, I learned a mapping of individual characters to colors with a chrome extension I made, so the text size doesn't really matter since words are just sequences of colors. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rainbow-text/jhkgcmdmjneppikhcokmmgjodcgcgdjp https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rainbow-text/jhkgcm...
JKCalhoun 6mo ago
Gonna have to ask for a proportional version of this font. I mean, look at the capital "I". ;-)
dnnddidiej 6mo ago
Makes me wonder. Geeks are happy to learn a new keyboard layout. What about a new alphabet that can give higher on screen density of data. Now 3x3 isn't necessary because we have high res monitors. We need 26 distinguishable shapes for a-z. In theory (focusing on non colourblind english speakers) there could be say 8 distinct colours and 8 shapes giving 64 chars.
- mchl-mumo 6mo ago
  This would be insanely cool. Building characters for the digital era not for handwriting.
- DHowett 6mo ago
  There was a project a while back that attempted to do this, named “Dotsies”. https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm (original site https://www.dotsies.org https://www.dotsies.org, which has a casual introduction text that slowly transitions into dots; however, it was unavailable at the time of writing.)
- fluoridation 6mo ago
  Doesn't braille already cover this need?
- pjc50 6mo ago
  As various Japanese developers have discovered, you can fit quite a lot of distinct characters into 8x8 if your audience is familiar with them: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/36423/is-this-8px-height-font-understandable-for-japanese-knowing-people https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/36423/is-this-8... However I don't think even native developers with full Unicode language support tend to use Japanese/Chinese characters in variable names or keywords. There is the occasional hybrid registry key such as "令和_令_Reiwa_R" (which will allow the temporary replacement of the name of the Emperor in Windows dates when the current one dies).
archargelod 6mo ago
Most tiny fonts are actually terrible to read at a glance especially when they're rendered at 1:1 scale. I've had a need couple years ago for a very tiny and compact font for a game mod I was making. And after trying a lot of 33, 35, even 2*5 fonts - they were all terrible to read. In the end, I found "Gremlin-3x6" font[0] made by the guy named zephram. It's 1 pixel taller, but still a very compact when laid out horizontally. But, most importantly, all standard latin characters are pretty distinct from each other and it remains readable without zooming in too much. Unfortunately, since then, zephram deleted his fontstruct account and all of his fonts. I have a copy of this font in my mod repo[1] along with a CC0 license and you can see the actual rendering of the font in the project screenshots[2]. [0] - https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1488093 https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1488093 [1] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/src/branch/master/assets/fonts https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/src/b... [2] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/media/branch/master/assets/screenshots/screenshot.png https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/media...
- ciupicri 6mo ago
  > The server returned a "404 Not Found". for [0]
  - archargelod 6mo ago
    As I explained in the last paragraph of my comment, it was deleted for some reason. I also couldn't find any archives of that page. I only added the link to show where I got the font from, in case people will miss the link inside the license file.
connorboyle 6mo ago
[dead]
drdeca 6mo ago
simplifier has a 4x4 version : https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4 https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4
shumatsumonobu 6mo ago
This is gorgeous. 5x5 is a wild constraint — every pixel has to earn its place. The fact that it's still readable at that size says a lot about the craft.
thwarted 6mo ago
This reminded me of work to get the C64 to do 80 columns in software, using a 3x7 pixel grid (with one row and column used for spacing), some of which were part of commercial products. https://www.pagetable.com/?p=901 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=901 > Creating a 4×8 character set that is both readable and looks good is not easy. There has to be a one-pixel gap between characters, so characters can effectively only be 3 pixels wide. For characters like “M” and “N”, this is a challenge.
- kruador 6mo ago
  I remember using Tasword Two for the ZX Spectrum. Even with a 3x7 font (4x8 grid) it only achieves 64 characters per line. Apparently in Tasword III the authors implemented 128 characters per line - by scrolling. Competitors could apparently show 80 characters per line, but only by switching to a horribly unreadable 2x7 font. "I found the tiny 80 column characters tiring to read but the mode is useful if you want to see what the finished output will be like." - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/31/words.htm https://www.crashonline.org.uk/31/words.htm . I can't find a screenshot.
biomech 6mo ago
In the 3 x 2 example, the text is supposed to say “can probably” but I think the glyph for b was used instead, so it reads “you ban probably”.
JCTheDenthog 6mo ago
>Narrower 4x5 and 3x5 dimensions are possible, but would require sacrificing the M, dotted zero, and reduce U/V/Y distinctiveness. I think 3x5 works well enough: https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html
LandenLove 6mo ago
Now do 1x2 using Morse code.
userbinator 6mo ago
Looking at the screenshots shows why there's a reason 5x7 is the "standard" for tiny legible fonts that cover all of ASCII, e.g. as found in character LCD displays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD44780_(integrated_circuit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD44780_(integrated_circuit)
sponno 6mo ago
And for 1x1 screens ..........................
Pxtl 6mo ago
The 3x5 size is pretty common in wplace, it's a good compromise.
larsbrinkhoff 6mo ago
The LINC minicomputer operating system LAP6 came with a 4x5 font, but it didn't have lower case.
thuridas 6mo ago
Some non-ascii characters will be hard on 5x5 like ñ o É
happyweasel 6mo ago
Used this kind of font for output on the 320x200 screen all of the time in the late 80s while coding 68k asm on the Atari St
konschubert 6mo ago
When I was building the layouts for my e-paper calendars , I needed pixel fonts due to the lack of grayscale on the display. It was surprisingly hard to find them - especially with customers asking for Cyrillic characters.
rustyhancock 6mo ago
I love this but the licensing is ashame. Does the NC in CC4.0 BY-NC-SA mean I couldn't for example sell a device using this? What fustrates me about this is that it's such a narrow workspace, if I decided I wanted a 5x5 font there are very few ways to do that. I get that this probably isn't copyrightable but at least make your license sensible.
orac81 6mo ago
The site looks interesting, but it has a pop up called "navigation" that cannot be closed, and sits over the page rendering parts unreadable.
keepamovin 6mo ago
Idk why maybe my font-size on this screen is too small but when I glanced at that title I read: "Sex Pistols font for tiny screens" haha
voidUpdate 6mo ago
This reminds me of the book Arcade Game Typography (https://www.counter-print.co.uk/products/arcade-game-typography https://www.counter-print.co.uk/products/arcade-game-typogra...), which looks at the history of a lot of arcade game fonts, sorted by category, and often has a full sprite sheet of the letters. I've been meaning to make my own digitised copy of all of the fonts for a while
gurkwart 6mo ago
Nice overview. > At this size, there's no way to have a distinct upper and lowercase [...] 3x4 is feasible. I've designed the MiniGent font [1], including greek letters, numerals, punctuation, math, currency, and emojis. Written a whole LaTeX typesetter [2] around it. While not perfect, I'm amazed by how far you can take it arranging just a few pixels. [1] https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/minigent/ https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/minigent/ [2] https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/pixeltex/ https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/pixeltex/
bigell 6mo ago
This is awesome! I could almost fit an entire 80x40 terminal on my watch face!
inflam52 6mo ago
Thumby has a 3x5 but I do like this 5x5 better https://thumby.us/API/Text-and-Font/ https://thumby.us/API/Text-and-Font/
division_by_0 6mo ago
I created a very similar 5x5 font in 2025, which I currently just use to render the word "CYBERNETIC" [0]. Only the "R" and "Y" characters are different from the article's font (no wonder, given the limited degrees of freedom). What I did in addition is add a discrete radial gradient with increasing brightness towards the center, which is of course very playful, but looks cool for a logo font and makes the individual pixels visible. [0] https://cybernetic.dev https://cybernetic.dev
phkahler 6mo ago
This is horrible. The upper case is almost pixel-identical to the built in font on the Interact Home Computer - the one I learned on in 1980. This font adds lower-case which is impressive but still sucks. I know from years of using a 5x5 font that it's terrible in practice. Side note: the Interact triple scanned every row of pixels, so the vertical resolution was only 77 (ish, it was overscanned) pixels. Had they used a bit more RAM for the display they could have easily just double-scanned each row and increased to a 5x7 font. That would have been a huge improvement. BTW still need to find a museum that wants an Interact.
michaelcampbell 6mo ago
I have an irrational love for this.
superxpro12 6mo ago
Where was this when i was working on my 128x64 oled screen???? I ended up finding a bitmap and modifying it for my own needs. That was fun.
andrewmu 6mo ago
I haven't got round to publicising it yet, but I made a web application for designing small pixel fonts: https://microfonts.com/ https://microfonts.com/ The smallest legible one I've come up with is 4x6 (with inter-character spacing).
nomdep 6mo ago
This brings me back to the custom HP-48G applications with UIs made pixel-by-pixel. 3x5 letters where everywhere, but 3x4 and even 3x3 were used and were still legible: - https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/ship.png https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/ship.png - https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/othellof.png https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/othellof.png
dorfsmay 6mo ago
I was surprised they used a square (5x5) as fonts are usually taller than wide. But they mention: > Narrower 4x5 and 3x5 dimensions are possible, but would require sacrificing the M, dotted zero, and reduce U/V/Y distinctiveness Note whole the characters are 5x5, the character box is 6x6 to provide for Spain between characters, from what I can tell from https://maurycyz.com/projects/mcufont/real.jpg https://maurycyz.com/projects/mcufont/real.jpg
caspar 6mo ago
2x2 pixel font is probably impossible[1], but with a few more pixels of width someone made a surprisingly readable 2-pixel-high font: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1myh81x/2px_high_font/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1myh81x/2px_high_... Released by the author at https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html [1]: unless you use multiple glyphs for a char. Or maybe it'd be possible to interpret if the glyph-to-char mapping pattern was very carefully thought out..
markusMB 6mo ago
Turns out, just by adding a 1 pixel border, you can (visually) turn the characters into a Aruco AR code dictionary :-) The dictionary created from the whole font does have uniqueness collisions – it depends on your use case if that is problematic. But you can create a font of AR codes that can be read by machine as well as human: https://codeberg.org/markusBM/ARuChars#readme https://codeberg.org/markusBM/ARuChars#readme
lilinzheng 6mo ago
你好
lilinzheng 6mo ago
嗨喽

822 points by zdw 6mo ago

This is great, i use a 3x3 font i drew up for lowres games, though there are many example that look mostly the same since it is such a small space.

lostmsu 6mo ago

Small g is unreadable. I obviously know the alphabet and despite that it took quite some time to understand what letter is that.

bartvk 6mo ago
Perhaps they should've used something similar to the 9. However then it wouldn't really look like a lower-case g.
- antraip 6mo ago
  Here is how I would personally modify lowercase g: xxx x x xxxxx x xxxx It looks a bit like a 9 but the descender is different. (Could play around with how many x's to put on the first and third lines, particularly whether to set the first/last bits on those lines as "corners" or make it more rounded.) I would also modify the top of lowercase e in a similar fashion.
  - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
    I might do something like this instead: xx x x xx x x xx A little awkward, but very distinct from the 9. The reason to narrow the head of it is to allow the end of the descender to rise upwards without turning it into an 8.
eichin 6mo ago
From using Okidata printers back in the day, a "tall" lower case g really does look bad in running text. (The similarity to the e is a little troublesome, but I don't have a fix for that...)

ramses0 6mo ago

...and don't forget "twoslice": https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html I haven't done the pixel-by-pixel deviation checking, but they may be comparable and independently derived!

Nnnes 6mo ago
See also Picket Right, 2 pixels wide (7 high) and still readable: https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font
graybeardhacker 6mo ago
Can people read that? I want to do a study to see the cognitive difference between people who can read that and those who can't. I can't at all.
- JoshTriplett 6mo ago
  I could read every word at nearly full speed, with the exception of "tends" that required a lot of puzzling out. But I'm backfilling a lot of information from context, the same way that this works: https://www.dictionary.com/articles/typoglycemia https://www.dictionary.com/articles/typoglycemia It would have been much harder to read a series of random words, or another piece of text with a less predictable structure.
- GaryBluto 6mo ago
  I tried copying a random line of text, pasted it into the textbox and could read most of it. Only a few words tripped me up.

dfox 6mo ago

IIRC the really cheap Casio Organizers/DataBanks of 90's used 5x5 font. And then my ex used something like that on linux in order to fit a ridiculous amount of xterms onto 14" CRT (somewhat absurd feat with her congenital vision defect).

IvanK_net 6mo ago

Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already. It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).

JoshTriplett 6mo ago
> Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfal12856a00151b-128x56-transparent-oled-screen https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfal12856a00151b-128x56... - 128x56 https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfag12864u4nfi-128x64-transparent-graphic-lcd-display https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfag12864u4nfi-128x64-t... - 128x64 There's a whole world of embedded devices with wide varieties of screen resolutions.
- IvanK_net 6mo ago
  That is not a tiny screen, it has over 7 thousand pixels. I think you will not be able to read 5x5 pixel letters on that display (a letter would be about 1 mm tall).
  - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
    0.27mm dot pitch, so each letter would be 1.35mm square in a box of 1.62mm square. I expect I could read it just fine at the distances I'd expect to look at such a screen. I tested this on a phone, and was able to read it without much difficulty at roughly 18-30 inches.
  - ranger_danger 6mo ago
    What is your definition of a tiny screen?
compiler-guy 6mo ago
Quick browsing at adafruit.com (or any other similar vendor), reveals plenty of displays that are 128, 240, and 320 pixels wide. At 6 pixels of width per character, that's only 21, 40, and 53 characters wide. Seems quite useful to me. There are also several 32x32 led panels, which one could imagine needing some text. Also, this kind of thing is just interesting, regardless of the usefulness.

JoshTriplett 6mo ago

These look great. I would have loved to have seen a sample of the 4x5, not just the 5x5.

DonThomasitos 6mo ago

Incomplete blog post! Where was the comparison vs. a 1x1 pixel font?

FelipeCortez 6mo ago

1x5 can also work if you take advantage of subpixel rendering https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/

rossant 6mo ago
Whoa, amazing!
dorianmariecom 6mo ago
"if you look closely at the screen"
- Tade0 6mo ago
  My child has one of those "Kids' microscopes": https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kids'-Microscopes/zgbs/toys-and-games/166306011 https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kids'-Microscopes/zgbs/t... Magnification is around 5x, but this is more than enough to see subpixels.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
JohnDotAwesome 6mo ago
Amazing. I zoomed in with my phone on the generated image and was surprised to see I could just make out the text! https://storage.j0.hn/subpixelfont.png https://storage.j0.hn/subpixelfont.png - Also wow my screen is dirty af
- jkonline 6mo ago
  Suggest you check your .htaccess (or however you secure your server) for storage.j0.hn.
throwaway27448 6mo ago
It seems like you need 2x5 for legibility
6mo ago

iamjackg 6mo ago

I actually thought of this (or a previous similar project? The one posted here seems more recent...) just a few days ago while watching the announcement video for this new DJ device, since it seems to use a 5x5 font: https://driftdj.com/dj-hybrid https://driftdj.com/dj-hybrid

botanrice 6mo ago
yo! thanks for sharing, this is a wicked cool device. I've always wanted a "pocket" mixer to take with me on planes and trains. I know there are smaller devices that can perform that duty but their more like repurposed EQ or audio interfaces that can be used to mix. but wowza!! $900 for that lil guy, dang!
- iamjackg 6mo ago
  I know, it looks incredible. It popped up on my YouTube feed and I got super excited, but then I thought "I bet this is going to be at least $800." I was wrong in the worst possible way.
  - botanrice 6mo ago
    I'm curious of the target audience with that price point. Wealthy hobbyists aside, any serious djays are not going to use that during a gig. Maybe as a novelty? Maybe they just haven't figured out how to scale, idk. Can't help but think if they could sell that for, idk, $300? even $400. You'd get all kinds of people using it in fun ways. -- ON another note, a few months back some guy posted here how he made a very simple midi device for his young daughter with a raspberry pi or the like. I do wonder if you could make a pocked-sized EQ-mixer with crossfade with this kind of interface. Do you know of anything like that?

bmurray7jhu 6mo ago

Similar discussion for CJK scripts https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pixel-resolution-needed-to-support-chinese https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pix...

soperj 6mo ago

If the author sees this. I think the lower case t would benefit from a pixel above the cross, similar to how the lower case k goes up one more pixel. It looks a lot like the capital T with how it is now. It is very well done though. Thanks for sharing.

gpm 6mo ago
I think I'd go with something like x xxx x xx
- soperj 6mo ago
  didn't even think about the stem on the bottom. Originally I was thinking just the cross x xxx x x But I think you're right.
usefulcat 6mo ago
Agree about lowercase t. I was surprised the lowercase l didn't look more like xx x x x xx

kibwen 6mo ago

> 4x4: Not enough to draw "E", "M" or "W" properly. However, 5x5 isn't enough to draw "e" properly if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase, so you need at least 6 vertical pixels. And then that isn't enough to draw any character with a descender properly, so you need at least 7 vertical pixels (technically you should have 8 in order to allow "g" and "y" to have a distinct horizontal descender while still sitting on the baseline, but this is probably an acceptable compromise). And remember that in practice this means you will still need at least 8x6 pixels to draw each character, to allow for a visible gap between letters below and beside them.

mulr00ney 6mo ago
I think the `e` looks better in the 'real pixels' example they gave; I find my tends to 'fill in' the space of the top part of the letter, and I suspect in the context of a longer sentence it'd be pretty easy to parse. (but yeah, it's not quite right, and is especially jarring in the nice, clean, blown up pixels in the top example)
- kibwen 6mo ago
  It definitely looks better in the second screenshot than the first, but you have to be very, very close to the screen in order to see individual pixels like that. And on low-res displays, which this sort of font might be necessary for, it's going to look somewhat different because low-res screens tend to be chosen for cheapness, and cheap screens tend to be monochrome, so none of that artistic fuzzy subpixel coloring.
- benj111 6mo ago
  Was it intended that we should fill in the word 'mind' ourselves, to prove your point???
JoshTriplett 6mo ago
> if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase I think that's the least of the properties I'd be willing to sacrifice to have a font that tiny.

z2 6mo ago

The 3x2 is fascinating, it's the same resolution as braille, albeit rotated 90 degrees. I wonder if this could become a braille-like system that's both visually and finger-readable. Note: there are repeat glyphs here like c and o, though the example actually uses a different c somehow. But perhaps repeats are ok given context.

0110101001 6mo ago
In the 2x2 resolution (which can't support all of Braille, but does support the first 10 characters), A, B, C, E, and F are all the recognizable Braille shapes for those letters (though in offset positions). At first, it seemed like an Easter egg, but it's probably just a natural happenstance of two people centuries apart deciding to represent the first ten letters of the alphabet in a 2x2 grid with a general idea to use fewer dots at the start than at the end.

damieng 6mo ago

You can get nicer 5x5 fonts amd it was not that uncommon back in the day. 4 wide is not too bad if you make the center of M and W just two pixels inset from top or bottom respectively or borrow the spacing column. Plenty of systems did it like CP/M on the Spectrum +3 and it looks pretty decent.

TruthSHIFT 6mo ago

Don't forget Jason Kottke's Silkscreen font: https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/ https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/

ghssds 6mo ago

You could do a bit better with a 4x5 font for every characters except M, W, m, and w which would be 5x5 but use the pixels normaly used to separate them from the next character, so every caracters still use the same width.

perarneng 6mo ago

If you start from the bottom of the page directly and scroll up then the 5x5 looks even better.

calebm 6mo ago

You could call it the "Minimum Viable Font"

rbanffy 6mo ago

One nice use for these tiny fonts is large text in terminals. Unicode now has 2x4 (from Kaypro), 2x3 (from Teletext, TRS-80), and 2x2 mosaic characters. Unicode also has 3x3 large text (from HP terminals) but font and terminal support is limited.

kevin_thibedeau 6mo ago
I assume you mean Braille is the 2x4 set. What range introduces 3x3 codepoints?
- rbanffy 6mo ago
  The 3x3 are the large text blocks - intended to use in 3x3 groups to form letters and numbers from the fragments in the range. There are 2x4 mosaics as well, separate from the Braille alphabet. These are symbols coming from legacy systems (such as the HP terminals and Kaypro CP/M machines).

akavel 6mo ago

See also u8g2 fonts: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/index.html https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/index.htm... (available also in original C at: https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall)

octagons 6mo ago

I developed a font with a similar resolution that was not nearly as legible for my Pi Zero with an e-ink screen many years ago. It allowed for similar tooling such as the flipper zero and esp32 marauder projects. I should fire that project up and implement this font…

Footprint0521 6mo ago
Dude I was thinking exactly that, might have to mod my f0 momentum firmware

onlyrealcuzzo 6mo ago

I love the design of your website!

Dwedit 6mo ago

A 3x5 font does not sacrifice the M or W. H,M,W end up as similar looking characters, but the M has the center pixel one higher, and the W has the center pixel one lower.

thesuperevil 6mo ago

tliltocatl 6mo ago

At that point, just go Braille! Amazing work anyway.

ludocode 6mo ago

The 5x5 is very nice, and the 3x5 isn't bad either. Unfortunately neither of them have all of ASCII. The size is also a bit misleading because you need to add spacing so really they need a 6x6 or 4x6 grid. I'm quite fond of Spleen: https://github.com/fcambus/spleen https://github.com/fcambus/spleen It has a 5x8 font which has all of ASCII, but most glyphs are actually 4x8 and include horizontal spacing. I modified it to reduce the rest for a project I'm doing so all glyphs are 4x8. The result can be rendered on a 5x9 grid with a guaranteed line of horizontal and vertical spacing between all glyphs. It's very nice.

RachelF 6mo ago
In the early 1980s there were actually word processors for the Apple 2 which had a 40 column display (7 pixel wide fonts default) that gave 60 columns using the a 5x5 font in graphics mode. It was a selling point. The hardware solution was to buy an "80 column card" that gave 80 columns of proper text, if your monitor could handle it.
tomtomtom777 6mo ago
At 3x5 it states: > The "M", "W" and "Q" suffer, but it's still got a distinct O and zero. The Q is weird; I would think it makes more sense to draw it as a zero with the bottom right set.

dmitrygr 6mo ago

I have used this one before, it uses one fewer pixels per char: (4x6 = 24 < 25 = 5x5) https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1656341/tom-thumb https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1656341/tom-thumb

mikestew 6mo ago

"Images were displayed on an Apple 30" Cinema Display" Yowsa. For those playing at home, that monitor is over 20 years old: https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/apple_cinema_display_30.html https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...

GolfPopper 6mo ago

I didn't seen any mention of Tony Pai's quite good 3x3 font (only uppercase): https://tonypai.itch.io/3x3-pixel-font https://tonypai.itch.io/3x3-pixel-font

throwaway287391 6mo ago
A bunch of these appear to be 9x9-ish? (B, P, Q, R, Z, 0, most of the non-alphanumerics...)

ESMP 6mo ago

Wouldn't something like this be ideal for devices like Xteink X4?

sbarre 6mo ago
The resolution on my X4 is pretty decent, and regular fonts look just fine. I don't think there's a need for tiny fonts on an e-reader, even one with a small screen. IMO when you're reading a book I think you want to prioritize readability, not characters-per-page.

jh00ker 6mo ago

I always loved the 5x6 Pixel font in this classic 90s PC game: https://covertaction.fandom.com/wiki/Cryptography_(Mini-Game) https://covertaction.fandom.com/wiki/Cryptography_(Mini-Game... The extra 1 pixel of height for the text in green, in particular, allowed for some cool "italic" styling, especially for letters like E, D, J, U, V

pugworthy 6mo ago

CGA era developers are like, "Yea been there done that..."

reaperducer 6mo ago
And Commodore 64 people. VIP Term, and others, had 3x7 fonts on 4x8 grids to connect to 80-column mainframes.

mjaniczek 6mo ago

Oh cool, I have to try these fonts on my amber CRT getting commands from an Elm webapp ([demo](https://youtu.be/M9Q5tFPtGaA?t=121 https://youtu.be/M9Q5tFPtGaA?t=121), [code](https://github.com/Janiczek/crt-esp32-elm/tree/main/vdom/ https://github.com/Janiczek/crt-esp32-elm/tree/main/vdom/)) - there's not a lot of real estate in a 400x240 NTSC resolution. But the scanlined rendering has so much charm! EDIT: realized a better demo for this discussion would be the photos I took of all the tiny bitmap fonts I had converted to the C array style at the time. Thread has more but here are my favorites: https://bsky.app/profile/janiczek.cz/post/3mh25atboz224 https://bsky.app/profile/janiczek.cz/post/3mh25atboz224

namanvyas 6mo ago

I've used 3x5 fonts on a couple of embedded projects and honestly the biggest pain isn't the font itself, its getting the spacing right.

huydotnet 6mo ago

I'm gonna use this article to explain to my peers about LLM quantization!

carlovalenti 6mo ago
[dead]

Theodores 6mo ago

Many decades ago it was anti aliasing with MS clear type that made small text possible. Yet, before that, for regular TV, this had been worked out, so lots of text could be shown on things like business TV, in glorious analogue PAL or never twice same colour for Americans. Small text is an interesting problem, but we have moved on from pixels as useful units.

enriquto 6mo ago

This is cool, but my problem is the opposite: I have a modern laptop screen with tiny pixels. What I need is then a huge bitmap font... does anybody have any?

frankling_ 6mo ago
Here are a few made by upscaling and then manually cleaning up classic fonts: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI The glyph coverage is enough for most programming languages; missing glyphs just fall back to a pixelized look. Lode 1.5x works really well at 110 ppi displays, which seems to be the uncanny valley for antialiasing.
sandos 6mo ago
Why a bitmap font if you have tiny pixels? Just use a sharp font like Iosevka or similar.
- enriquto 6mo ago
  i want all occurrences of the same glyph to be identical. This is essentially impossible to obtain with blurry "antialiased" fonts.

AvAn12 6mo ago

Like dot matrix printer fonts

patrakov 6mo ago

Using multi-level grayscale instead of just two pixel states, on and off, can produce readable text at even smaller font sizes. The catch is that I have to say "text", not "letters", i.e., rely on humans inferring the too-blurry letters from their context. And I do not even need a specially designed font for that. Example: https://imgur.com/a/text-80-characters-per-line-240-pixels-wide-AlYrnSS https://imgur.com/a/text-80-characters-per-line-240-pixels-w... That's 3 horizontal pixels per character on average, including inter-character spacing.

rahimnathwani 6mo ago

6×3 is also good (fits on a 7×4 grid). https://archive.org/details/zx_Tasword_2_Tutor_1983_Tasman_Software_a https://archive.org/details/zx_Tasword_2_Tutor_1983_Tasman_S...

russellbeattie 6mo ago

I think on my 6.8" WQHD+ 3200 x 1440 phone screen (70.5mm width), an actual 5x5 pixel square might be the size of a period → . Doing the math, 70.5mm / 1440px = 0.05mm per pixel, x5 = 0.25mm wide. Just a guess though, I'm not exactly sure how big a period is without a microscope.

chuckadams 6mo ago

Fonts like this are also great for huge screens like LED signage. Big pixels and very low resolution, so logically a tiny screen.

analog8374 6mo ago

i really like your website design

analog8374 6mo ago

bunk! he left out 1x1

hank808 6mo ago

Very cool for anyone with flawless eyesight!

anthk 6mo ago

I remember a weird font with a special alphabet made of dots or something like that. Not Braille, it was for fast reading or such.

SyzygyRhythm 6mo ago

The ship computers in the old game Privateer (and probably Wing Commander) had a pretty nice pixel font. Most of the characters were 3x4, but with a few niceties: descenders (j, p, q) could go below the normal outline, and wide glyphs like m/n/w were more than 3 pixels wide. Overall, pretty readable for uppercase/lowercase/numerics, and included a few "futuristic" touches.

davebren 6mo ago

Somewhat relevant, I learned a mapping of individual characters to colors with a chrome extension I made, so the text size doesn't really matter since words are just sequences of colors. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rainbow-text/jhkgcmdmjneppikhcokmmgjodcgcgdjp https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rainbow-text/jhkgcm...

JKCalhoun 6mo ago

Gonna have to ask for a proportional version of this font. I mean, look at the capital "I". ;-)

dnnddidiej 6mo ago

Makes me wonder. Geeks are happy to learn a new keyboard layout. What about a new alphabet that can give higher on screen density of data. Now 3x3 isn't necessary because we have high res monitors. We need 26 distinguishable shapes for a-z. In theory (focusing on non colourblind english speakers) there could be say 8 distinct colours and 8 shapes giving 64 chars.

mchl-mumo 6mo ago
This would be insanely cool. Building characters for the digital era not for handwriting.
DHowett 6mo ago
There was a project a while back that attempted to do this, named “Dotsies”. https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm (original site https://www.dotsies.org https://www.dotsies.org, which has a casual introduction text that slowly transitions into dots; however, it was unavailable at the time of writing.)
fluoridation 6mo ago
Doesn't braille already cover this need?
pjc50 6mo ago
As various Japanese developers have discovered, you can fit quite a lot of distinct characters into 8x8 if your audience is familiar with them: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/36423/is-this-8px-height-font-understandable-for-japanese-knowing-people https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/36423/is-this-8... However I don't think even native developers with full Unicode language support tend to use Japanese/Chinese characters in variable names or keywords. There is the occasional hybrid registry key such as "令和_令_Reiwa_R" (which will allow the temporary replacement of the name of the Emperor in Windows dates when the current one dies).

archargelod 6mo ago

Most tiny fonts are actually terrible to read at a glance especially when they're rendered at 1:1 scale. I've had a need couple years ago for a very tiny and compact font for a game mod I was making. And after trying a lot of 33, 35, even 2*5 fonts - they were all terrible to read. In the end, I found "Gremlin-3x6" font[0] made by the guy named zephram. It's 1 pixel taller, but still a very compact when laid out horizontally. But, most importantly, all standard latin characters are pretty distinct from each other and it remains readable without zooming in too much. Unfortunately, since then, zephram deleted his fontstruct account and all of his fonts. I have a copy of this font in my mod repo[1] along with a CC0 license and you can see the actual rendering of the font in the project screenshots[2]. [0] - https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1488093 https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1488093 [1] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/src/branch/master/assets/fonts https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/src/b... [2] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/media/branch/master/assets/screenshots/screenshot.png https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/media...

ciupicri 6mo ago
> The server returned a "404 Not Found". for [0]
- archargelod 6mo ago
  As I explained in the last paragraph of my comment, it was deleted for some reason. I also couldn't find any archives of that page. I only added the link to show where I got the font from, in case people will miss the link inside the license file.

connorboyle 6mo ago

[dead]

drdeca 6mo ago

simplifier has a 4x4 version : https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4 https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4

shumatsumonobu 6mo ago

This is gorgeous. 5x5 is a wild constraint — every pixel has to earn its place. The fact that it's still readable at that size says a lot about the craft.

thwarted 6mo ago

This reminded me of work to get the C64 to do 80 columns in software, using a 3x7 pixel grid (with one row and column used for spacing), some of which were part of commercial products. https://www.pagetable.com/?p=901 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=901 > Creating a 4×8 character set that is both readable and looks good is not easy. There has to be a one-pixel gap between characters, so characters can effectively only be 3 pixels wide. For characters like “M” and “N”, this is a challenge.

kruador 6mo ago
I remember using Tasword Two for the ZX Spectrum. Even with a 3x7 font (4x8 grid) it only achieves 64 characters per line. Apparently in Tasword III the authors implemented 128 characters per line - by scrolling. Competitors could apparently show 80 characters per line, but only by switching to a horribly unreadable 2x7 font. "I found the tiny 80 column characters tiring to read but the mode is useful if you want to see what the finished output will be like." - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/31/words.htm https://www.crashonline.org.uk/31/words.htm . I can't find a screenshot.

biomech 6mo ago

In the 3 x 2 example, the text is supposed to say “can probably” but I think the glyph for b was used instead, so it reads “you ban probably”.

JCTheDenthog 6mo ago

>Narrower 4x5 and 3x5 dimensions are possible, but would require sacrificing the M, dotted zero, and reduce U/V/Y distinctiveness. I think 3x5 works well enough: https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html

LandenLove 6mo ago

Now do 1x2 using Morse code.

userbinator 6mo ago

Looking at the screenshots shows why there's a reason 5x7 is the "standard" for tiny legible fonts that cover all of ASCII, e.g. as found in character LCD displays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD44780_(integrated_circuit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD44780_(integrated_circuit)

sponno 6mo ago

And for 1x1 screens ..........................

Pxtl 6mo ago

The 3x5 size is pretty common in wplace, it's a good compromise.

larsbrinkhoff 6mo ago

The LINC minicomputer operating system LAP6 came with a 4x5 font, but it didn't have lower case.

thuridas 6mo ago

Some non-ascii characters will be hard on 5x5 like ñ o É

happyweasel 6mo ago

Used this kind of font for output on the 320x200 screen all of the time in the late 80s while coding 68k asm on the Atari St

konschubert 6mo ago

When I was building the layouts for my e-paper calendars , I needed pixel fonts due to the lack of grayscale on the display. It was surprisingly hard to find them - especially with customers asking for Cyrillic characters.

rustyhancock 6mo ago

I love this but the licensing is ashame. Does the NC in CC4.0 BY-NC-SA mean I couldn't for example sell a device using this? What fustrates me about this is that it's such a narrow workspace, if I decided I wanted a 5x5 font there are very few ways to do that. I get that this probably isn't copyrightable but at least make your license sensible.

orac81 6mo ago

The site looks interesting, but it has a pop up called "navigation" that cannot be closed, and sits over the page rendering parts unreadable.

keepamovin 6mo ago

Idk why maybe my font-size on this screen is too small but when I glanced at that title I read: "Sex Pistols font for tiny screens" haha

voidUpdate 6mo ago

This reminds me of the book Arcade Game Typography (https://www.counter-print.co.uk/products/arcade-game-typography https://www.counter-print.co.uk/products/arcade-game-typogra...), which looks at the history of a lot of arcade game fonts, sorted by category, and often has a full sprite sheet of the letters. I've been meaning to make my own digitised copy of all of the fonts for a while

gurkwart 6mo ago

Nice overview. > At this size, there's no way to have a distinct upper and lowercase [...] 3x4 is feasible. I've designed the MiniGent font [1], including greek letters, numerals, punctuation, math, currency, and emojis. Written a whole LaTeX typesetter [2] around it. While not perfect, I'm amazed by how far you can take it arranging just a few pixels. [1] https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/minigent/ https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/minigent/ [2] https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/pixeltex/ https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/pixeltex/

bigell 6mo ago

This is awesome! I could almost fit an entire 80x40 terminal on my watch face!

inflam52 6mo ago

Thumby has a 3x5 but I do like this 5x5 better https://thumby.us/API/Text-and-Font/ https://thumby.us/API/Text-and-Font/

division_by_0 6mo ago

I created a very similar 5x5 font in 2025, which I currently just use to render the word "CYBERNETIC" [0]. Only the "R" and "Y" characters are different from the article's font (no wonder, given the limited degrees of freedom). What I did in addition is add a discrete radial gradient with increasing brightness towards the center, which is of course very playful, but looks cool for a logo font and makes the individual pixels visible. [0] https://cybernetic.dev https://cybernetic.dev

phkahler 6mo ago

This is horrible. The upper case is almost pixel-identical to the built in font on the Interact Home Computer - the one I learned on in 1980. This font adds lower-case which is impressive but still sucks. I know from years of using a 5x5 font that it's terrible in practice. Side note: the Interact triple scanned every row of pixels, so the vertical resolution was only 77 (ish, it was overscanned) pixels. Had they used a bit more RAM for the display they could have easily just double-scanned each row and increased to a 5x7 font. That would have been a huge improvement. BTW still need to find a museum that wants an Interact.

michaelcampbell 6mo ago

I have an irrational love for this.

superxpro12 6mo ago

Where was this when i was working on my 128x64 oled screen???? I ended up finding a bitmap and modifying it for my own needs. That was fun.

andrewmu 6mo ago

I haven't got round to publicising it yet, but I made a web application for designing small pixel fonts: https://microfonts.com/ https://microfonts.com/ The smallest legible one I've come up with is 4x6 (with inter-character spacing).

nomdep 6mo ago

This brings me back to the custom HP-48G applications with UIs made pixel-by-pixel. 3x5 letters where everywhere, but 3x4 and even 3x3 were used and were still legible: - https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/ship.png https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/ship.png - https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/othellof.png https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/othellof.png

dorfsmay 6mo ago

I was surprised they used a square (5x5) as fonts are usually taller than wide. But they mention: > Narrower 4x5 and 3x5 dimensions are possible, but would require sacrificing the M, dotted zero, and reduce U/V/Y distinctiveness Note whole the characters are 5x5, the character box is 6x6 to provide for Spain between characters, from what I can tell from https://maurycyz.com/projects/mcufont/real.jpg https://maurycyz.com/projects/mcufont/real.jpg

caspar 6mo ago

2x2 pixel font is probably impossible[1], but with a few more pixels of width someone made a surprisingly readable 2-pixel-high font: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1myh81x/2px_high_font/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1myh81x/2px_high_... Released by the author at https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html [1]: unless you use multiple glyphs for a char. Or maybe it'd be possible to interpret if the glyph-to-char mapping pattern was very carefully thought out..

markusMB 6mo ago

Turns out, just by adding a 1 pixel border, you can (visually) turn the characters into a Aruco AR code dictionary :-) The dictionary created from the whole font does have uniqueness collisions – it depends on your use case if that is problematic. But you can create a font of AR codes that can be read by machine as well as human: https://codeberg.org/markusBM/ARuChars#readme https://codeberg.org/markusBM/ARuChars#readme

lilinzheng 6mo ago

你好

lilinzheng 6mo ago

嗨喽