[HN Gopher] 4x4 ASCII Font
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       4x4 ASCII Font
        
       Author : thunderbong
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2022-10-07 22:02 UTC (58 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (simplifier.neocities.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (simplifier.neocities.org)
        
       | omoikane wrote:
       | I like this, it's like code golf but for fonts. It's cool that it
       | can be done but not something I would use regularly.
       | 
       | I think the end game would be a 3x2 font that is basically
       | Braille.
        
       | simonjgreen wrote:
       | Impressive how readable that still is, and how good our brains
       | are at filling blanks, but you wouldn't want to rely on it. I'm
       | not sure I can parse || as an x reliably for example. The
       | uppercase alone works, lowercase is pretty challenging.
        
         | xyproto wrote:
         | On the upside, x isn't used that much.
        
       | seanalltogether wrote:
       | Isn't everything on the page in a 3x3 grid?
        
         | mccorrinall wrote:
         | Nope. Take a look at lowercase j.
        
           | scrollaway wrote:
           | It sounds to me like it should be possible to use a 4x4 grid
           | but add a single bit to express whether the letter is shifted
           | up or down by 1px. Then your characters are 4x4 but occupying
           | a 5x4 space.
        
       | jamal-kumar wrote:
       | As much as I love bitmapped fonts I just don't know if there's
       | one that supports unicode yet and since I work internationally
       | it's kind of a sticking point in wanting to go all the way to
       | using them in my terminal or whatever, even though it looks
       | incredibly crisp. Is there anything like that out there which at
       | least covers characters in latin alphabets with diacritics and
       | cyrillic?
        
         | crispyalmond wrote:
         | Unifont[0] covers a lot of Unicode codepoints.
         | 
         | [0] https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont/
        
       | wongarsu wrote:
       | The uppercase version is kind of ok. I'm not a fan of the 9 or
       | the D, but I think you'd quickly get used to that. What's even
       | more impressive is that if you consider just uppercase and
       | numbers, it's a 3x3 font.
        
       | snvzz wrote:
       | I feel strongly that it should be possible to do this better.
       | 
       | 4x4 box, yet most characters seem to be confined to 3x3 box. This
       | can't be right.
        
       | xani_ wrote:
       | So 4x4 is too small for readable font
        
         | akvadrako wrote:
         | Uppercase is readable.
        
           | numlock86 wrote:
           | Only in context. Letters like B, D, E, G, O, M and W are just
           | literal blobs of pixels without any indication of what the
           | actual letter might be. You can only tell C and E apart if
           | you know what the other one looks like. Even worse for lower
           | case. See x for example.
        
           | hyakosm wrote:
           | THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LASY OOO TED4PLTO7O TIMESY
        
         | trasz wrote:
         | I wonder if - and if so, how much - its readability improves
         | with readers' experience with it.
        
           | vesinisa wrote:
           | Yes indeed. I am sure the author learned to read texts with
           | this font quite fluently while working on it, and you'd learn
           | too with little practice.
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | Seems 5x5 is the limit. 5x5 is perfectly readable to me, while
         | this 4x4 one is not always very clear.
         | 
         | Example of 5x5:
         | https://www.dafont.com/5x5.font?text=Small+fonts+have+always...
        
           | 1-6 wrote:
           | Looks like the 5x5 example doesn't even bother recreating
           | lowercase letters.
        
             | kelseyfrog wrote:
             | This makes it completely unusable.
        
           | zugi wrote:
           | Nice but keep in mind that 5x5 font just punted on lower case
           | letters entirely. So there are no descenders and they use the
           | full 5x5 for upper case.
           | 
           | The 4x4 font has lower case, so it reserves the bottom row
           | for descenders gjpqy. Its upper case letters don't use the
           | descenders row so they're really 3x3, which is barely
           | readable. It's actually interesting that the all caps 3x3 is
           | almost readable!
           | 
           | For comparison it would be interesting to see a 4x4 all caps
           | font, or a 5x5 with lower case.
        
           | _def wrote:
           | I remember these from various forum signature prestige
           | graphics lol
        
       | alrlroipsp wrote:
       | Nope.
        
       | trasz wrote:
       | This is an interesting idea, but given how inexpensive the high
       | resolution small SPI-connected LCD displays already are, this
       | might not be a very useful solution.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-07 23:00 UTC)