It seems like you need 2x5 for legibility

Whoa, amazing!

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 - Also wow my screen is dirty af

Actually blown away by how good that works with my 1920x1200 8-bit HP Z24n G2 monitor [1] and my Laptop's 1920x1080 6-bit Panel [2]

[2x5-HP-Z24n-G2] https://i.imgur.com/yLyrpfg.jpeg

[1x5-HP-Z24n-G2] https://i.imgur.com/Z7kH005.jpeg

[2x5-Innolux-N156HCA-GA3] https://i.imgur.com/F4Ypxwj.jpeg

[1x5-Innolux-N156HCA-GA3] https://i.imgur.com/etkot5o.jpeg

[1] https://jp.ext.hp.com/monitors/business/z_z24n_g2/

[2] https://www.panelook.com/N156HCA-GA3__15.6__overview_33518.h...

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.

> 5x5 isn't enough to draw "e" properly if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase

It can be enough if you "cheat" and make use of the horizontal space. This is how I did it in my font:

   ##
  # #
  ##  #
   ###

> 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.

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 . I can't find a screenshot.

Agree about lowercase t. I was surprised the lowercase l didn't look more like

    xx
     x
     x
     x
     xx

Suggest you check your .htaccess (or however you secure your server) for storage.j0.hn.

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.

There was a project a while back that attempted to do this, named “Dotsies”.

https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm (original site https://www.dotsies.org, which has a casual introduction text that slowly transitions into dots; however, it was unavailable at the time of writing.)

"if you look closely at the screen"

I was annoyed that all the images of the pixel fonts were larger than they actually ostensibly would be on a tiny screen, so I zoomed out my browser all the way on macbook pro retina screen, only to find the tiny letters of the blog text were 100x more readable than any of the pixel fonts in the post.

And if the pixel font images were to be rendered at actually 5 pixels on my Retina screen, because the resolution of Retina screen is so tiny, the pixel fonts would still be unreadable without a microscope.

So while it's a cool project, as long as we can put Retina-dense screens in things, we are past the point where there is any useful need for a 5 pixel font

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)

I think I'd go with something like

     x
    xxx
     x
     xx

> The server returned a "404 Not Found".

for [0]

The content isn't viewable in my area. Presumably the UK has rules about minimum font sizes.

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!

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...)

My child has one of those "Kids' microscopes":

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kids'-Microscopes/zgbs/t...

Magnification is around 5x, but this is more than enough to see subpixels.

$30 devices don't have apple screens.

FTA "Even a low-resolution 384x288 display has 110 thousand pixels: way too big to fit in the AVRs memory"

Retro games

Electronic devices

Fine prints in images

Perhaps they should've used something similar to the 9. However then it wouldn't really look like a lower-case g.

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.

Was it intended that we should fill in the word 'mind' ourselves, to prove your point???

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.

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.

No, it's the ultra authoritarian government stopping you from viewing it.

Replace "imgur.com" in the links with "rimgo.bcow.xyz" and consider voting against the parties of surveillance next time you can :)

Dude I was thinking exactly that, might have to mod my f0 momentum firmware

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-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).

Why a bitmap font if you have tiny pixels? Just use a sharp font like Iosevka or similar.

Here are a few made by upscaling and then manually cleaning up classic fonts: 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.

This would be insanely cool. Building characters for the digital era not for handwriting.

Doesn't braille already cover this need?

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

See also Picket Right, 2 pixels wide (7 high) and still readable: https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font

There's a really nice, very low-power, 84x48 B&W LCD screen still widely available for electronics use, a clone of a Nokia 5110 screen - see e.g.:

- https://github.com/akavel/clawtype#clawtype

- mandatory "Bad Apple" vid (not mine): https://youtu.be/v6HidvezKBI

(for the "splash screen" linked above I used font u8g2_font_3x5im_te: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/struct.u8... and a multilingual u8g2_font_tiny5_t_all: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/struct.u8...)

I assume you mean Braille is the 2x4 set. What range introduces 3x3 codepoints?

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.

I wish that were the case. I'm trying to make a tiny emulated z80 computer, and to fit a screen of 64x16 test on a smartwatch sized screen, I have to use a 4x6 pixel font, because the highest res, most available screen I can get in that size is just 240x280. High-res 400+ px smartwatch screens like the apple watch has - you can only get those if you buy 10000 at once and sign an NDA.

Actually, the 4x6 doesn't look half bad if viewed at wrist-level.

128x64 monochrome screens are very common in both LCD and OLED format.

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.

And Commodore 64 people.

VIP Term, and others, had 3x7 fonts on 4x8 grids to connect to 80-column mainframes.

Terminals are tiny screens.

> Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already.

Find me a 0.66" OLED display for ~$1 that has hundreds of pixels on each side then.

> 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).

What train of thought led you to think people are primarily researching colorising new B&W photos? As opposed to historical ones, or those of relatives taken when they were young? You can take a colour photo of granddad today but most likely the photos of him in his 20s are all in black and white.

There exist plenty of reasons to colorize grayscale photos in 2026.

* a huge corpus of historical imagery

* cheaper grayscale cameras + post processing will surely enable all sorts of uses we haven't imagined yet.

* a lower power CCD and post-processing after the fact or on a different device allows for better power budget in cheap drones (etc).

* these algorithms can likely be tuned or used as a stepping stone for ones that convert non-visible wavelengths into color images.

And that's just off the top of my head as someone who doesn't really work with that stuff. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons I can't think of.

> Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore.

https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfal12856a00151b-128x56... - 128x56

https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfag12864u4nfi-128x64-t... - 128x64

There's a whole world of embedded devices with wide varieties of screen resolutions.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

It would have been much harder to read a series of random words, or another piece of text with a less predictable structure.

If you know a person who is 70 years old, they were 20 in 1975 - color photos existed back then.

Every grayscale photo of someone famous has already been colorized during the past 50 years. If there are only grayscale photos of you, you were probably born before 1900, and all your friends or your children (who might want to colorize your photo) are probably dead, too.

Grayscale cameras are not that much cheaper than color cameras. And if you decided to use a grayscale camera on purpose, you probably do not care about the color information (which would be totally "made up" by the colorizing algorithm).

Also, if there are only grayscale photos of you, you were probably born before 1900, and all your friends or your children (who might want to colorize your photo) are probably dead, too.

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).

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.

> If you know a person who is 70 years old, they were 20 in 1975

Bloody hell, warn people before you post things like that.

Color photos existed but color film and processing was very expensive (and while mono film development "middle school student can do at home" for a generation, home color work wasn't a thing until late 80s/early 90s as far as I recall.) So in practice, I personally have childhood pics of my dad with his mom and sister - that were shot black and white but colorized by being hand painted, and this was pretty common...

What is your definition of a tiny screen?

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.

What does the existence of a color photograph of my grandmother as an old woman have to do with my desire to colorize a grayscale photo of her as a child? Or colorize the photos of her wedding?

It's a very strange argument to make: there exist some photos therefore other photos may not be colorized!

1. Improving the colourisation algorithms has value, it might be that the available colourised photos of celebrities have inaccurate colours or are of poorer quality than say, one done with a diffusion model that can be instructed about the colours of certain objects

2. Don’t forget about B&W films! Getting automatic methods to be consistent over a long length is still not 100% solved. People are very interested in seeing films from WW1 and WW2 in colour, for instance.

3. Plenty of people (myself included) have relatives in their 80s or 90s. Or maybe someone wants to see their ancestors from the 19th century in colour for whatever reason?

Did you colorize grayscale photos of your grandmothers wedding?

Seeing that a "neat tool" exists and using that "neat tool" are two diffrent things. Google Glass was neat, too.

I have not yet, because my uncle hasn't scanned those photos yet. I have colorized the pictures of my grandmother as a child, and some previously unmentioned ones of the farm my grandfather grew up on. I've also colorized some photos of ancestors that no one alive this century has ever met.

Just because you don't want to use a tool, it doesn't mean others also won't.

what are you even talking about? enough people want to colorize pictures that there's a damn Know Your Meme page for it

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/colorized-history

Is there a particular reason you resent what other people enjoy researching and spending time on, enough so to post all this?

I am just saying that the colorization was needed in 1995, when 90% of people had black-and-white childhood photos.

But today, only 1% of people has black-and-white childhood photos. I just makes me want to argue when people pretend that it is still needed as much as in 1995 :D

I was also arguing with my friends about buying laptops with an optical drive ten years ago :D