Nördnytt! 🤓5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
- gurkwart - 5231 sekunder sedanNice 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/ [2] https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/pixeltex/
- FelipeCortez - 68783 sekunder sedan1x5 can also work if you take advantage of subpixel rendering https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/
- ludocode - 63266 sekunder sedanThe 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
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.
- archargelod - 44464 sekunder sedanMost 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
[1] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/src/b...
[2] - https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/media...
- voidUpdate - 6950 sekunder sedanThis reminds me of the book 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
- bmurray7jhu - 68563 sekunder sedanSimilar discussion for CJK scripts
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pix...
- kibwen - 68157 sekunder sedan> 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.
- patrakov - 53724 sekunder sedanUsing 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-w...
That's 3 horizontal pixels per character on average, including inter-character spacing.
- soperj - 68325 sekunder sedanIf 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.
- orac81 - 9661 sekunder sedanThe site looks interesting, but it has a pop up called "navigation" that cannot be closed, and sits over the page rendering parts unreadable.
- keepamovin - 7202 sekunder sedanIdk 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
- rustyhancock - 11526 sekunder sedanI 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.
- TruthSHIFT - 68043 sekunder sedanDon't forget Jason Kottke's Silkscreen font: https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/
- jh00ker - 62113 sekunder sedanI always loved the 5x6 Pixel font in this classic 90s PC 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
- thwarted - 40954 sekunder sedanThis 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
> 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.
- konschubert - 12439 sekunder sedanWhen 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.
- mikestew - 62830 sekunder sedan"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/appl...
- huydotnet - 58692 sekunder sedanI'm gonna use this article to explain to my peers about LLM quantization!
- iamjackg - 68630 sekunder sedanI 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
- JCTheDenthog - 36660 sekunder sedan>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:
- lostmsu - 336524 sekunder sedanSmall g is unreadable. I obviously know the alphabet and despite that it took quite some time to understand what letter is that.
- chuckadams - 51790 sekunder sedanFonts like this are also great for huge screens like LED signage. Big pixels and very low resolution, so logically a tiny screen.
- happyweasel - 14131 sekunder sedanUsed 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
- userbinator - 29653 sekunder sedanLooking 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:
- mjaniczek - 59291 sekunder sedanOh cool, I have to try these fonts on my amber CRT getting commands from an Elm webapp ([demo](https://youtu.be/M9Q5tFPtGaA?t=121), [code](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
- shumatsumonobu - 41396 sekunder sedanThis 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.
- z2 - 68155 sekunder sedanThe 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.
- octagons - 64860 sekunder sedanI 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…
- perarneng - 66781 sekunder sedanIf you start from the bottom of the page directly and scroll up then the 5x5 looks even better.
- davebren - 49105 sekunder sedanSomewhat 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/jhkgcm...
- SyzygyRhythm - 49453 sekunder sedanThe 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.
- enriquto - 55891 sekunder sedanThis 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?
- dnnddidiej - 48342 sekunder sedanMakes 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.
- larsbrinkhoff - 23724 sekunder sedanThe LINC minicomputer operating system LAP6 came with a 4x5 font, but it didn't have lower case.
- parlortricks - 31877 sekunder sedanThis 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.
- calebm - 65603 sekunder sedanYou could call it the "Minimum Viable Font"
- biomech - 38403 sekunder sedanIn 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”.
- thuridas - 21096 sekunder sedanSome non-ascii characters will be hard on 5x5 like ñ o É
- rahimnathwani - 53198 sekunder sedan6×3 is also good (fits on a 7×4 grid).
https://archive.org/details/zx_Tasword_2_Tutor_1983_Tasman_S...
- damieng - 68100 sekunder sedanYou 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.
- rbanffy - 65381 sekunder sedanOne 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.
- dfox - 69527 sekunder sedanIIRC 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).
- GolfPopper - 62364 sekunder sedanI didn't seen any mention of Tony Pai's quite good 3x3 font (only uppercase):
- ghssds - 66992 sekunder sedanYou 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.
- pugworthy - 60263 sekunder sedanCGA era developers are like, "Yea been there done that..."
- ramses0 - 70361 sekunder sedan...and don't forget "twoslice": https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html
I haven't done the pixel-by-pixel deviation checking, but they may be comparable and independently derived!
- JoshTriplett - 69121 sekunder sedanThese look great.
I would have loved to have seen a sample of the 4x5, not just the 5x5.
- Dwedit - 64693 sekunder sedanA 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.
- namanvyas - 58782 sekunder sedanI'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.
- DonThomasitos - 68959 sekunder sedanIncomplete blog post! Where was the comparison vs. a 1x1 pixel font?
- drdeca - 41973 sekunder sedansimplifier has a 4x4 version : https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4
- IvanK_net - 69242 sekunder sedanToo 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).
- ESMP - 62281 sekunder sedanWouldn't something like this be ideal for devices like Xteink X4?
- hank808 - 51487 sekunder sedanVery cool for anyone with flawless eyesight!
- tliltocatl - 63675 sekunder sedanAt that point, just go Braille! Amazing work anyway.
- AvAn12 - 54006 sekunder sedanLike dot matrix printer fonts
- Pxtl - 26982 sekunder sedanThe 3x5 size is pretty common in wplace, it's a good compromise.
- akavel - 64983 sekunder sedanSee also u8g2 fonts: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/index.htm... (available also in original C at: https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall)
- onlyrealcuzzo - 64696 sekunder sedanI love the design of your website!
- anthk - 50972 sekunder sedanI remember a weird font with a special alphabet made of dots or something like that. Not Braille, it was for fast reading or such.
- russellbeattie - 52028 sekunder sedanI 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.
- Theodores - 57800 sekunder sedanMany 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.
- dmitrygr - 62924 sekunder sedanI have used this one before, it uses one fewer pixels per char: (4x6 = 24 < 25 = 5x5)
https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1656341/tom-thumb
- JKCalhoun - 48952 sekunder sedanGonna have to ask for a proportional version of this font.
I mean, look at the capital "I".
;-)
- sponno - 27858 sekunder sedanAnd for 1x1 screens ..........................
- analog8374 - 51540 sekunder sedanbunk! he left out 1x1
- analog8374 - 51668 sekunder sedani really like your website design
- LandenLove - 33756 sekunder sedanNow do 1x2 using Morse code.
- thesuperevil - 64401 sekunder sedanGg
- connorboyle - 42493 sekunder sedan[dead]
