(C) BoingBoing This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Tiny pixel fonts are a challenge. With double-width pixels, they're a nightmare. [1] ['Rob Beschizza'] Date: 2025-11-28 My first computer suffered an economy found in early 8-bit machines with limited video memory: if you wanted lots of colors, you got less pixels, and a rational way to do that with the hardware back then was to make pixels twice as wide. This creates weird aesthetic constraints, not least when it comes to rendering text. Fonts would be badly stretched! Devs would avoid this by having type so tiny it was barely readable outside of UI contexts… Or by using resolution-switching interrupts, like so, which gave up on having text in the colorful play area… The Bard's Tale used anti-aliasing to try and improve legibility, but at such low resolution I'm not at all sure it works. The white on black capitals are particularly difficult. Trying to find a font that is both tiny but also "anamorphic" is almost an absurdity as this resolution but even now, decades later, I don't think anyone's ever seen good-lookin' text on the 160 x 200 modes on the C64 and Amstrad CPC. The general problem of pixel font legibility didn't die with the 8-bit machines; the Nintendo Game Boy and Sega Game Gear kept it alive. Making one's own 3×3 "font" is a rite of passage for pixel artists. Even now, tiny contemporary OLEDs have even lower resolutions than what I was parked in front of in 1986. So I loved reading Moonbench's article about making tiny fonts for tiny screens. It's exhaustive, with extensive maps of possible glyphs at minuscule dimensions. Trying to convey language at small resolutions is an interesting area of exploration. While working on my previous OLED projects I often needed to fit text onto the tiny 128×64 screens. That prompted me to experiment with creating 1-bit fonts that were as small as possible. Is 2×2 possible without subpixel trickery? No! Of course not! 2×2 – Impossible To make an english font we need at least 36 symbols to represent the letters and numbers, and ideally more for punctuation. But the 2×2 space only has 16 possible characters. To make things worse, if the images that are isomorphic (the ones that look identical, such as the four that are just single dots) are counted as single glyphs then there are even fewer options. After combining the isomorphic images there are only 10 unique glyphs left. Enough to map to the digits 0-9 with nothing left over. 3×3 is where readability is attainable, but it's not really a typeface–it's like the characterless UI in those chunky old games. And W and M are bad news. If larger sizes bring legibility and character, when it comes to the 2x stretch, even 3×6 is hard going… I fancy the 3×8 Tiny Cyr by huyase is where reading sentence-length text becomes tolerable. Something like this, but with variable widths for Ws and Ms, might be just the ticket. (Not in Moonbench's review of options is this clever 3×2 font–surprisingly legible, but exactly the wrong thing for a doublewide stretch.) I don't think there's a fantasy console that enforces 2x-wide pixels; perhaps the idea is just too sadistic to contemplate. But it does have a look of its own… Previously: • 1600 sprites for your starkly old-school 1-bit games • This 1-bit 'peasant simulator' is the new game by the creator of Threes • 1-bit tarot cards with a glitched twist • Playdate, adorable 1-bit handheld game console, available for preorder next month [END] --- [1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/11/28/tiny-pixel-fonts-are-a-challenge-with-double-width-pixels-theyre-a-nightmare.html Published and (C) by BoingBoing Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/