[HN Gopher] Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowerca...
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Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase (2015)
Author : lsferreira42
Score : 381 points
Date : 2024-03-17 16:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| msarchet wrote:
| Just this morning I have been working on a font rasterizer for an
| eink screen project. So it's really interesting to see one this
| small.
| tripflag wrote:
| if you're in the market for something slightly bigger, I've
| found this font to be useful on lowish-res (640x480) displays:
| https://github.com/josuah/miniwi
| tomcam wrote:
| The size of the characters in pixels is not given in their
| readme, nor could I find it easily in the config files. Can
| you tell me how big the characters in its readme are?
| LukeShu wrote:
| looks like 3x5, or 4x8 if you include the whitespace
| medstrom wrote:
| The lowercase "s" is only 4 px tall. The "f" and "y" add
| 2 px above and below, so the total reserved height must
| be 8px. Then 2 more px for whitespace, so 10.
| LukeShu wrote:
| It's a 4x8 grid, like I said.
| https://lukeshu.com/dump/miniwi-grid.png
|
| Weird that the lowercase letters with ascenders are
| taller than normal uppercase, I didn't notice that. But
| yeah, the core numbers+uppercase box is 3x5 (with only
| "Q" violating that). And it's all on a 4x8 grid.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Readable is a very strong word
| ocrow wrote:
| They're really stretching the definition of readable.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Yes but their bar is "readable" not "very readable by all
| without effort," so I'm not sure why y'all find this so usage
| so objectionable. Yeah it wasn't easy but I was definitely
| able to read the example text on my phone as-is/without
| zooming or anything.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Meh in that case even a barcode is 'readable'.
| lolinder wrote:
| The upper case letters are fine (impressive, considering
| the resolution), but there's no way I could read the lower
| case if I didn't already know the text.
| mysteria wrote:
| Same for me! I could definitely understand the upper case
| text at 100% resolution on a 24" 1080p screen. The lower
| case text was terrible and nearly unreadable.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I was able to read the lower case on a 6.7" ~2.8k
| smartphone screen. I imagine they don't expect literally
| every person to be able to read it on every machine. This
| feels rather nitpick-y.
| lolinder wrote:
| But did you read it after reading the upper case? And are
| you an American?
|
| It's the same text as the upper case version and it's the
| Declaration of Independence, which a lot of us know
| pretty well. I initially tricked myself into believing
| that I could read it until I got past the part that I
| knew well, at which point I realized that I wasn't
| reading it so much as using the shapes as a mnemonic to
| help _remember_ it.
|
| (As an aside, it's not nitpicky to say "I can't read this
| font that bills itself as the smallest readable font",
| it's just an expression of doubt as to the advertised
| qualities of the font.)
| mysteria wrote:
| On a 6.7" display, assuming 16:9, the screen is 5.8"
| wide. With 2.8k pixels across each pixel is 0.002 inches
| wide. I'm pretty sure you aren't viewing it at 100%
| resolution on the phone as each glyph would render as a
| nearly invisible dot.
| baking wrote:
| This brings back some memories, but my eyesight is worse than it
| was 50 years ago, so no.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Like some in-game text/graphic from my 8-bit days. I was a big
| Tau Ceti/Academy player.
| johnklos wrote:
| I can finally have 85 characters by 48 characters on my Sinclair
| ZX81, and it'd be printable, too, on my T/S 2040 printer.
|
| (starts thinking in Z80...)
| chx wrote:
| Which leads to the question: what is the smallest Z80 assembly
| function which takes an ASCII code as an input and returns one
| of these characters some way? 3x4 is 12 bits so with a little
| waste one can fit it into a 16 bit register pair. You could
| thus encode it into a 96*2=192 byte lookup table but isn't
| there some procedural generation to shrink that?
| volemo wrote:
| I believe a table and a lookup function would be smaller than
| a function for generating bitmaps: just for a single pixel
| I've got this expression [1]. [1]: not(c0)
| and not(c2) and c3 and not(c4) and c5 and not(c6) or not(c0)
| and c2 and c3 and not(c4) and c5 and c6 or c0 and c2 and
| not(c3) and c4 and not(c5) and c6 or c0 and not(c1) and c2
| and c3 and c4 and c6 or c0 and c1 and not(c2) and c3 and c4
| and c6 or not(c1) and not(c3) and not(c4) and c5 and c6 or
| not(c2) and c3 and c4 and not(c5) and not(c6) or not(c0) and
| c1 and not(c3) and c5 and not(c6) or not(c0) and c1 and
| not(c2) and not(c3) and c4 or not(c0) and c1 and c3 and
| not(c4) and c5 or c1 and c3 and not(c4) and c5 and c6 or c1
| and c2 and c4 and not(c5) and not(c6) or c0 and not(c1) and
| not(c4) and c5 and not(c6) or c0 and not(c2) and not(c4) and
| c5 and c6 or c0 and c1 and not(c3) and c5 and c6 or not(c0)
| and not(c1) and c4 and not(c5)
| chx wrote:
| Nah, I am thinking like half a table and half some tricks
| to generate ... back in the day people were doing crazy
| crafty tricks to squeeze the most out of the rather limited
| memory of the machines.
| johnklos wrote:
| Oops. It's 3x4 inside of a 4x5 box, meaning a Sinclair ZX81 can
| only do 64 x 38 :(
| veltas wrote:
| In my experience you get a lot of density moving to a variable-
| width font, which is quite easy to write for a Z80 system. For
| example I've designed a couple with the horizontal size in the
| first byte of the bitmap:
|
| https://github.com/Veltas/spectrum-env/blob/master/font-orig...
|
| https://github.com/Veltas/spectrum-env/blob/master/font-smal...
|
| Rendering:
|
| https://github.com/Veltas/spectrum-env/blob/master/text.asm#...
|
| Looking back at it, my Z80 for this isn't that good, but it was
| still fast enough to redraw a whole line of text in 1 or 2
| frames, I'm sure others can do better.
| sxp wrote:
| If you're interested in other tiny fonts:
|
| - PICO-8's 3x5 font with support for programming characters:
| https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=faq
|
| - Ken Perlin has an RGB stripe subpixel font. Unfortunately, the
| original page uses Java so I can't access it, but
| https://www.fastcompany.com/1662778/the-worlds-smallest-legi...
| has more info.
|
| - Dotsies if you're willing to try very strange encodings:
| https://dotsies.org/
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127419 has more
| examples.
| accrual wrote:
| A favorite of mine is the MonteCarlo Programmer Font [0]. I
| used it as my terminal font for a couple years.
|
| [0] https://www.bok.net/MonteCarlo/
| whhuh wrote:
| It looks like it's been iterated on quite a few times. Here's
| an active descendant project, for anyone that might be
| interested: https://github.com/sunaku/tamzen-font
| accrual wrote:
| I didn't know about this, thanks for sharing!
| dheera wrote:
| 3x4 = 12 bits
|
| 52 upper/lower case letters + 10 numerals [?] 64 = 6 bits
|
| It's kind of amazing that the overhead is only a factor of 2 to
| literally read BINARY data with my eyes.
|
| And that a 1bpp uncompressed image of a piece of text can be
| only 50% larger in file size than its .txt file and be
| readable.
| notorandit wrote:
| Readability is in your own eyes.
|
| What it is readable for you, is not for me.
|
| Just map lower case to uppercase and replace any non alpha-
| num to a black square. This font is not for general use but
| just to squeeze text messages on tiny displays.
|
| TBH, I see all this pretty useless. While still interesting
| enough.
| Avshalom wrote:
| obviously 8x8 is comparably enormous but
| https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/ has a great
| collection of fonts
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Theres also the wonderful "Arcade Game Typography: The Art of
| Pixel Type" by Toshi Omigari which has pages and pages of
| fonts used in arcade games, sorted by style, most of which
| are 8x8
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Also; if you really, really want the old-skool feel of the
| Trident 8900 SVGA card you had in your early 90s PC-
| compatible, or your Toshiba laptop from the same period:
|
| https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
| lencastre wrote:
| Mouse TTF
| 6510 wrote:
| I believe mine, while very incomplete, given some practice, is
| the most readable of the lot.
|
| http://synesthesia.go-here.nl
| sgustard wrote:
| Of related interest, the smallest grid needed for Simplified
| Chinese is 8x8:
|
| https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pix...
| dmazzoni wrote:
| I'm glad you linked to one with subpixel rendering.
|
| Considering that when we view text on a modern display we're
| almost always seeing anti-aliased grayscale pixels with
| subpixel rendering, it doesn't make sense to me that you'd
| design a font that doesn't take advantage of that.
|
| Why not even grayscale? Surely a few of the letters could be
| improved by using a pixel other than pure black or pure white?
| gitgud wrote:
| Uppercase is impressive for 3x4 pixels. Lowercase is pretty much
| unreadable...
| skygazer wrote:
| You learn to read it, or at least I did as a child trying to
| use a small font on the c64 when connected to BBSs, so I could
| see ascii art without wrapping. It takes reminders like this to
| realize how awash in high density pixels we are now.
| resolutebat wrote:
| Agreed. Sample:
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Michaelangel007/nanofont3x...
|
| It's difficult to read even when you know it's the Declaration
| of Independence.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That's not quite the fault of the font. It's the fault of the
| author who decided to use very small pixels. The sample
| images are unreadable as presented, but they're a lot more
| readable magnified 300%. You have to achieve a certain size
| before it's possible to see anything, but you don't need much
| detail.
|
| However, given that the size is required anyway, there's no
| downside to using more detail. This font could be useful for
| a display with enormous pixels, but it's useless otherwise.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| No I couldn't make it out even scaled up. I'd see a square,
| or three dots, and even relying upon context of other
| nearby letters I could reasonably well recognize there's no
| way to see if that's an [a, e, s, o, n, m] or what.
|
| At this pixel scale I say just blat brail onto the screen
| and give people one more reason to learn that already well
| established and unambiguous writing system.
| snowpid wrote:
| Does anyone know the size of the font from the first Pokemon
| games? They had similar constraints.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| It's 7 pixels high, like most games on that platform, because
| it fits with the 8x8 tiling system (if you had the space
| between lines)
|
| https://github.com/pret/pokered/blob/master/gfx/font/font.pn...
| LukeShu wrote:
| 8x8 tiles; most characters fit in 7x7 to allow for 1px between
| characters
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I see I have a slightly different interpretation of the word
| 'readable' lol.
| Anotheroneagain wrote:
| Minuscule gets down to 2; 3 and above don't even look that weird.
| Maybe that pixel fonts are not the optimal choice.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase
|
| Readable by who ?
| neverokay wrote:
| Don't let the lawyers find this font.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Not that readable.
| pavl wrote:
| Is this downloadable somewhere as TTF?
| 3rd3 wrote:
| A nano font but huge images. The large image is a 4873 KB bitmap
| which can be losslessly compressed to 47 KB using PNG.
| vardump wrote:
| Nowadays it's often hard to even notice a 4 MB file, especially
| when you're on a gigabit connection or better.
|
| Of course unfortunately not everyone has a connection like
| that. But can understand how someone might have missed it.
| andenacitelli wrote:
| This is sometimes so hard to remember. There's so much
| content on optimizing for page size -- and admittedly, it
| does matter a lot in some industries like e-commerce and/or
| if you have users in less developed countries -- but quite a
| lot of situations kind of just let you ignore it.
|
| I work in B2B and we frankly put way more effort in than we
| should have to optimize bundle size before just making the
| assumption that everyone has a good connection and we didn't
| really need to worry about it.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I work with parolees who often only have government-issued
| phones with maybe 5GB or 15GB of data per month, which
| generally only lasts the first couple of days of the month
| due to issues like that. I come across home pages regularly
| now that are >250MB of download :(
| lencastre wrote:
| What?
|
| Can you provide links to a page that is 250 MB download?
| consp wrote:
| > Nowadays it's often hard to even notice a 4 MB file,
| especially when you're on a gigabit connection or better.
|
| The images on the page load quite slowly. Wifi is terrible
| here due to way too many hotspots and way too many different
| businesses providing their own wifi. And the trunk which it
| is on is also horrible in it's own right so even when the
| wifi connnection is ok, it's still broken.
|
| So no, this is not fine.
|
| (ping is between 100-4000ms on a good day and speeds between
| 100Kb/s to about 40Mb/s (that's bit, not misspelled byte), on
| a bad day it's None)
| vardump wrote:
| No one said it's fine.
| dheera wrote:
| Github also loads something like 4.6MB of JavaScripts and other
| crap, according to chrome dev tools, so ...
| bonki wrote:
| I won't defend that, but at least that will mostly be cached
| and reused. There is really no excuse for huge pictures like
| that, especially when they can be losslessly compressed to a
| fraction of their size.
| Moru wrote:
| It's also compressed while sending so that is most likely
| the unpacked size you see there.
| samatman wrote:
| I propose that this sort of font be called "decipherable" rather
| than "readable".
|
| I could learn to read this. I can kinda-sorta make out the
| example, because I already know the Declaration of Independence.
| Is it readable the way, say, this text is? Or the PICO-8 font?
| No.
| kuboble wrote:
| I think any font which is decipherable becomes readable with
| practice.
|
| The characters in the font are unique and clear so learning to
| read it should be easier that say reading using some completely
| unknown alphabet.
|
| This font should be easier to read than most people's hand
| writing.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| The lowercase characters are non-unique, which may be what GP
| was referring to. For instance "ox" and "co" can only be
| distinguished by context.
| vpribish wrote:
| if more than one bit of color was allowed you could make
| different levels of grey/opacity hint at where the opening
| in the symbol should be. just as learnable and now it's
| unique.
|
| taken to a silly extreme, you could compress 26 letters
| into 2 pixels, 3 colors, and 3 levels of opacity. before
| even considering a time-dimension.
|
| a mantis shrimp just needs one pixel with color.
| Moru wrote:
| What is wrong with morse code? Just need one pixel that
| blinks.
| samatman wrote:
| Many people's handwriting is best described as "decipherable"
| as well, yes.
|
| A readable font takes no practice to read, presuming you
| already read the script of the font and the language of the
| text. A decipherable one can be sort of limped through at
| first and probably picked up to fluency with experience.
| Although, as the article notes, this font has homonymous
| glyphs, there are only a few words where that creates
| ambiguity, and as few as none where it would be ambiguous in
| context.
| kuboble wrote:
| > A readable font takes no practice to read
|
| No. Any font takes a lot of practice to read. Maybe the
| difference is that you define "readable" as readable
| immediately by anyone who is already familiar with modern
| fonts?
|
| I'm sure medieval fonts were readable to pepole who wrote
| them, but when I look at them I need to labor at every
| letter.
| samatman wrote:
| > _Any font takes a lot of practice to read_
|
| Yes, people aren't born knowing how to read.
|
| > _you define "readable" as readable immediately by
| anyone who is already familiar with modern fonts_
|
| This is the only reasonable definition of "readable".
| hinkley wrote:
| I worked on project planning software years ago. We got caught in
| a loop arguing about fonts and data density.
|
| We were getting lots of clipping of text and I asserted that even
| a couple more characters on the screen would improve people's
| abilities to guess what the entire phrase was. You can derail
| momentum in project management meetings by having people ask what
| something says repeatedly. Seen it happen, it's dumb and we can
| fix it.
|
| So it came down to a shootout. We put five fonts on a projector
| screen, at multiple font sizes, stood everyone against the back
| wall of the fairly average sized meeting room (maybe 70th
| percentile), and had them vote.
|
| Verdana 13pt won for legibility, even over some of the 14 pt
| fonts. It also got more characters per inch, so win win.
| Something in the range of 5-10%.
|
| Then corporate made us change it back because their flagship app
| used a different font and they wanted them to match. Which made
| no goddamned sense because they weren't even used together.
| yosito wrote:
| Incredible how much money corporations are willing to waste on
| this kind of bike shedding lol
| dsp_person wrote:
| > In case you are interested, there are a total of 65,536 4x4
| monochrome glyphs. Here is a uber texture atlas that shows all of
| them with our glyphs highlighted (red) where they are in the
| table.
|
| So did this font exist all along and was simply discovered?
|
| And same goes for everything we create, but just in higher
| dimensions??
| rcxdude wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
| dsp_person wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
| junon wrote:
| Unlike the flagrant dismissal in other comments I actually find
| use for projects like these. On some electronics that I write
| firmware for the OLED screen space real estate is incredibly
| limited, and when they need to output logs or debug info for
| developers it can be a pain to fit everything in a way that is
| usable, especially when there is no input to allow for scrolling
| or whatever.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| This. As soon as I saw this I thought "oh neat that'll come in
| use for my electronics displays"
| volemo wrote:
| I'd argue that character count advantage of this 3x4 versus say
| PICO-8's 3x5 is overshadowed by the loss of readability.
| gillesjacobs wrote:
| The lowercase is nigh unreadable but the all uppercase example
| is not too bad.
|
| Would be cool to integrate in my split keyboard OLED screens in
| ZMK firmware.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Yes!
|
| For all the discussion here, I feel like the README answers it.
| It was a fun project with a few use cases.
|
| > Once the novelty wears off a "practical" example would be
| rendering "in-game book pages" that don't look like complete
| gibberish, or an "accurate print preview" with real text
| instead of blurry placeholder pixels that don't even look close
| to being the glyphs scaled down.
|
| This seems very reasonable. They put it out there in case
| someone found it usefuo.
| gillesjacobs wrote:
| > Once the novelty wears off a "practical" example would be
| rendering "in-game book pages" that don't look like complete
| gibberish, or an "accurate print preview" with real text
| instead of blurry placeholder pixels that don't even look close
| to being the glyphs scaled down.
|
| Low-res or LoD video game textures are a bit of a stretch but
| could be cool.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Whe I was in high school I had plenty of dull classes to sit
| through. I'm old enough that there were no phones and laptops to
| keep entertained.
|
| My parents had a laser printer for their business. I realized
| that it had a very high DPI and also very little ink bleed. I
| started printing whole books I downloaded at the smallest font
| size that I could managed to still read, just a few point. I
| removed line breaks and printed out whole books on a page or two.
| I found it incredible how much tiny text I could fit on a page.
|
| In class I would read with a little half folded sheet of paper
| hidden in a notebook. Sci-fi, Russian lit, biographies, classics.
| I was never caught, but it's bizarre to think back that I was
| reading Crime and Punishment while the rest of the class was
| learning fake American history propaganda.
| arketyp wrote:
| > Sci-fi, Russian lit, biographies, classics. I was never
| caught, but it's bizarre to think back that I was reading Crime
| and Punishment while the rest of the class was learning fake
| American history propaganda.
|
| Sounds possible your teachers figured as much and let it slide.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I did eventually show a teacher and they were shocked. Their
| older eyes had no way of focusing on the text and they could
| barely tell it was anything but a sheet with grey lines.
| pvg wrote:
| _I was reading Crime and Punishment while the rest of the class
| was learning fake American history propaganda._
|
| You were simply unaware of the classmates who were secretly
| mastering the tiny 3d printed blade.
| userbinator wrote:
| I think 5x7 is the smallest size where characters are still fully
| recognisable, which is why it's used on all common character
| LCDs. Beyond that, with things like this font, reading becomes
| more of a "recognise vaguely evocative custom glyphs" exercise.
| klabb3 wrote:
| English speaker detected! Half kidding, but in my language that
| would be difficult. AAO
| kiicia wrote:
| ACELNOSZZ
| pornel wrote:
| It's also missing Kanji/Hanzi characters ;(
| jhbadger wrote:
| People got by using non-English languages in the 1980s when
| most computers only used ASCII due to their US/UK origins.
| Many languages already had such substitutions established,
| for example in German umlauts can be replaced with a
| following e, which were sometimes used on signs using block
| letters where there was no space for umlauts.
| tom_ wrote:
| The Atari ST had a 6x6 font (5x5 for most glyphs, 5x6 including
| descenders) that took surprisingly few liberties with the lower
| case chars. I'm going by memory, but this looks like an
| accurate rendition:
| https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/876150/atari_st_6
|
| Lower case "a", "e" and "i" are not ideal, but the rest look
| pretty good to my eyes! (The OS used this for icon titles, so
| there was only ever 1 row at a time. Probably recommended.)
| grumbel wrote:
| DSLinux[1] used a 4x6 font for the terminal, I found that
| surprisingly usable.
|
| [1] https://www.dslinux.org/dslinux-cpuinfo.jpg
| hammock wrote:
| >Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase*
|
| *Roman alphabet
| ramijames wrote:
| "Readable."
| croemer wrote:
| Why not use ligatures to help resolve some of the cox
| ambiguities?
| dsp_person wrote:
| Has anyone ever made the smallest (as in bytes) readable font?
| How small can the code be to generate a readable font? It could
| create an SVG, bitmap, or triangles in a shader.
| ddingus wrote:
| The upper case is amazing! I basically have zero problems reading
| it. The text talks about glyph ambiguity. Selecting those well
| appears to amplify readability.
|
| Neat!
|
| The lower case one takes a lot more adjustment. I did end up
| reading it fairly well, but never with the ease of the uppercase
| font.
| MithrilTuxedo wrote:
| Gonna use this for Dwarf Fortress.
| archargelod wrote:
| I had a project a couple months ago that required very tiny font:
| I did want to make a mod for the Binding of Isaac game on
| Nintendo Switch. The idea is to display some additional info
| about items that you encounter randomly in the dungeon. You can
| find final version in my codeberg repo [0].
|
| While pc version has extensive mod support, console ports lack
| necessary Lua api. So the only way I came up with to implement
| this - is to draw additional info on the sprite textures. And
| sprites are tiny - 32x32 pixels. Ok, I can't put a lot of text in
| such small space, but maybe I can fit item name and then add some
| simple 8x8 icons for effects.
|
| I started searching for a good font I can use, but ultimately
| most of the 3x4 and 3x5 fonts I tried had one issue - they're
| almost unreadable if the background color is not absolute
| negative of font color. I could've put an opaque black background
| behind text, but that would hide more art than necessary and even
| look somewhat hideous.
|
| While trying one font after other I found gremlin-3x6[1], it's
| only 2 pixels higher, but 5-10x easier to read. And it's under
| public domain license.
|
| Ok I mostly don't care about height, but width is still an issue
| - almost all item names exceed 32 pixels and have to wrap around
| on second line and some need a third line. That I absolutely do
| not want.
|
| I had an idea - If I can't shrink letters to less than 3 pixels,
| I can remove space between them. Wouldn't it make harder to read?
| Not unless all letters have different colors! That also solves
| the problem when background matches the color of font!
|
| [0] - https://codeberg.org/Archargelod/isaac-extended-icons-mod
| [1] -
| https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1488093/gremlin-3...
| diputsmonro wrote:
| Interesting, do you have a picture of this project in action?
| archargelod wrote:
| There is a screenshot in the Readme -
| https://codeberg.org/Archargelod/isaac-extended-icons-mod
|
| And another from earlier version of the mod -
| https://codeberg.org/Archargelod/isaac-extended-icons-
| mod/sr...
| btbuildem wrote:
| You'd figure this envelope had been pushed to its limit in the
| late 80's/early 90's
|
| Nice work! The uppercase is surprisingly readable -- some glyphs
| don't look like you'd first think they should, but that makes
| them stand out from the ones they'd otherwise be easily confused
| with.
| makmanalp wrote:
| Interestingly coincidental timing with Jonathan Hoefler posting
| about a trick to compress glyph size by omitting a block and let
| the eye complete it ... OK, it's taller but I think it looks
| quite pretty:
| https://www.instagram.com/p/C4n2BfFrKwH/?img_index=1
| yosito wrote:
| Maybe it's due to image compression artifacts, but I find the
| first example of normal case output impossible to read on my
| phone. Even if I zoom in. And I have exceptionally good eyesight.
| I'll have to try this directly on my desktop, where I imagine the
| clarity would be much better.
| boxed wrote:
| The zooming often does bicubic or some such upscale, which
| destroys legibility for these types of fonts.
| Timwi wrote:
| Bicubic upscaling is the default, but the `image-rendering:
| pixelated;` rule can be used to change it.
| boxed wrote:
| Yea, it's a pretty neat feature. I use it on my hobby
| project to show binary counting: https://bits.kodare.com/
| antirez wrote:
| There is another one here, with a tool to easily modify the font.
|
| https://github.com/antirez/freakwan/tree/main/font-4x6
| berkes wrote:
| "readable". I'm 45, been looking at screens for 30+ years almost
| daily now. There's no way I can read that with or without my
| glasses.
|
| It's truly impressive feat to get it this small. I used to do
| texts like this, often manually, pixel by pixel. For websites and
| games, it was all the rage back in late nineties early 2000s.
|
| But only now I start to truly understand,by experiencing first-
| hand, why accessibility matters. This font is awesome, but
| terrible for any kind of accessibility.
| user_of_the_wek wrote:
| I guess it's only meant for devices with (a smaller number of)
| large pixels. Your HiDPI monitor or retina iPhone screen will
| not be a good match.
| thebiss wrote:
| Possibly. The author mentions a few other uses under
| "Practicality":
|
| > Once the novelty wears off a "practical" example would be
| rendering "in-game book pages" that don't look like complete
| gibberish, or an "accurate print preview" with real text
| instead of blurry placeholder pixels that don't even look
| close to being the glyphs scaled down.
| close04 wrote:
| There's also the question if "readable" means just seeing the
| pixels as opposed to recognizing the glyph. Some people may
| just consider the recognizing the edges of the glyph as
| enough to consider it as being read but readability is
| strongly related to the ability to understand the text and
| its meaning.
|
| The lower case letters can mostly be read just in context.
| Looking at the characters here [0] 'g' is just a vertical
| solid rectangle and 's' is two diagonal pixels. 'W' looks
| more like an 'M' than the actual M letter.
|
| [0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Michaelangel007/nanofon
| t3x...
| _s_a_m_ wrote:
| I'm younger than you and I still can't read it at all
| :OOOOOOOOOOOOOO
| benjymo wrote:
| It's surprisingly readable if I zoom into the images. On 100%
| it's too small for me, but a modern computer or smartphone
| screen is probably not the use case.
| jhbadger wrote:
| I find the all uppercase version to be more or less readable
| when zoomed in -- although I don't think the Declaration of
| Independence was really referring to "Nature's DOD" (the D
| and G are nearly identical) but I find the lower case version
| to be completely unreadable.
| remram wrote:
| This seems to be a problem of screen resolution, not font. The
| number of pixels of the font doesn't have to relate to the size
| on your monitor at all.
|
| I also can't read it at 100% on a high-density monitor, but I
| can read it very comfortably at a normal size, even though
| glyphs have so few features.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The screenshots could not have been enlarged a bit? And they are
| bmp??
|
| I find one of the things a repository of a font should do is to
| put pictures of how this thing looks quite far up in the readme,
| so that I can quickly see, whether that is something for me or
| not.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Readability is an interesting claim. You obviously can't read
| base36 encoded data with this (like a sha1 hash) or even a
| randomly generated password because the glyphs don't map uniquely
| to characters. So the claim is not so much about ASCII but about
| English. It talks about some individual words being difficult but
| I suspect even those would be fine with sufficient context, like
| being in a paragraph. With even more context it's surprising how
| bad writing can be before it truly breaks down, for example your
| doctor's handwriting is OK as long as you know they're writing
| about medicine.
|
| Makes me wonder whether some languages are better at this than
| others. French, for example, contains some redundancy in its
| grammar as you have to write pronouns _and_ write the conjugated
| verb. Spanish gets rid of the redundant pronoun. So is French
| trading longer sentences for better readability? I wonder what
| natural language can have the shittiest font?
| JetSetIlly wrote:
| Interesting. With a bit of work, this would have genuine use for
| something like a text display on an Atari2600, where the
| dimensions are significantly limited.
|
| I've used glyphs as small as 4x5 but I've struggled to come up
| with anything smaller for most characters.
|
| Here's an example of a full text adventure for the 2600 if
| anyone's interested
| https://github.com/JetSetIlly/Adventureland-2600
|
| Better or worse with an even smaller font? I'm not sure.
| simonkagedal wrote:
| The claim "smallest readable 3x4 font" is a bit confusing. Are
| there bigger 3x4 fonts?
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| It's a variable width font, so it can be smaller than a fixed
| 3x3 font.
|
| For example it chose this (ambiguous) encoding for "o":
|
| --
|
| xx
|
| xx
|
| --
|
| where a bigger 3x4 font could choose the overhigh and wider
|
| -x-
|
| x-x
|
| -x-
|
| ---
| rhelz wrote:
| Very nice. I can even read the Declaration of Independence, as
| archaic and unfamiliar as the text is.
|
| If you are having trouble with it, try this: "Use the force!!" By
| which I mean, forget that its written in a very small font, don't
| go looking for the individual pixels, but just relax and read
| like any other text. Don't look at the letters, look at the
| words. Your brain fill in the details for you.
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