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Smallest Typeface

by simantel on 12/28/23, 10:44 PM with 110 comments

• by pushfoo on 12/29/23, 12:22 AM

  If you can spare extra pixels, Tom Thumb (3x5) [1] is more legible. The upper case M and N are somewhat hard to distinguish without context, but it's the only major flaw compared to this one.

  Tom Thumb is also Public Domain (CC0).

  [1] https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html

• by RpFLCL on 12/29/23, 1:34 PM

  I recently put together some very small fonts (3x3, 3x4, 3x5, 3x6, 4x4, and 5x5) and tried to enumerate most of the possible glyphs as part of working on little projects on SSD1306 OLED screens: https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tiny-pixel-art-fonts/

• by lifthrasiir on 12/29/23, 7:42 AM

  World's smallest typeface for 36 alphanumeric characters, to be exact. :-) There are some small typefaces for other scripts; my go-to example is the Misaki font [1] that supports all JIS X 0208 character within 8x8 pixels (spacing included, and most glyphs are within 7x7 bounds). It is incredibly hard to recognize some individual characters at this size, but the overall text is surprisingly readable.

  [1] https://littlelimit.net/misaki.htm

• by zserge on 12/29/23, 9:37 AM

  A while ago I created an even smaller typeface (2x3) but that is barely readable without memorising certain glyphs:

  https://zserge.com/posts/tiny-font/

• by elpocko on 12/29/23, 12:34 AM

  S and 5 are identical, as are Z and 2, and O and 0 (edit: and Q and 9). No punctuation either; semicolon vs. colon vs. exclamation mark needs creativity. There's no hope for $ or *.

• by wonger_ on 12/29/23, 1:46 AM

  I threw together a figlet font for this typeface, with a preview, here: https://wonger.dev/posts/monospace-dump#creations

  It won't render nice here because of line spacing and unicode but it should work fine in the terminal.

  See also another 3x3 font and someone else's figlet port of that one:

  https://fakoo.de/en/fakoo/fakoo-ttf.html

  https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/2021/05/18/3x3-typeface/

• by karaterobot on 12/29/23, 1:20 AM

  Not totally sure what I'd use this for. Silkscreen is bigger, but is a lot more legible at small sizes.

  https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Silkscreen

• by kragen on 12/29/23, 2:04 AM

  this is actually 4×4 if you're counting pixels needed on the output device instead of rom space needed; another, more comprehensive font of the same size is https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4

  the same problem happens with the public-domain 'tom thumb' font pushfoo linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38800409. it is actually 4×6 (24 output pixels) but claims to be 3×5

  it can be accessed despite tls problems at http://web.archive.org/web/20230828193815/https://robey.lag.... but says 'Please do not post this article to Hacker News.'

  my own 4×6 font is demonstrated at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dofonts-1k.html, where it fits into a 1024-byte web page along with all the logic needed to render ascii text with it; but the proportional font i used in http://canonical.org/~kragen/bible-columns (rendered with http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/propfontr...) is at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/6-pixel-1... and is slightly smaller; it averages 21.5 pixels per character. this is more than anders de flon's so-called 3×3, which is 16 pixels per character, but it supports the full character set, if you think ascii is the full character set anyway. so does simplifier's 4×4 font

  i think you could do better by using grayscale for antialiasing, and as rafabulsing pointed out, matt sarnoff's millitext http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ uses subpixel antialiasing to get very readable text at 1⅔×5 pixels

• by monokai_nl on 12/29/23, 11:15 AM

  I took a slightly different approach, while also using a 3×3 grid. It's explained here: https://minimalwim.com

  It's more of a typographic concept than being fit for actual use, but it was interesting to explore creating a font within a tight set of constraints.

• by lagrange77 on 12/29/23, 12:21 AM

  Hopefully the opt-out button and disclaimer designers won't discover this.

• by modeless on 12/29/23, 12:21 AM

  Anyone have some text set in this font so we can all see how easy it is to read?

  On my MacBook Air 13" seems like you could fit 640*400 = 256000 characters at once. Which ought to fit, for example, the complete text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

• by fimdomeio on 12/29/23, 12:27 AM

  For anyone thinking about using this: At some point I tried to do a logo for myself on a 3x3 grid (so pretty much the same as this) and while the text was perfectly readable to me a few people I tested it with couldn't read it.

• by nelox on 12/29/23, 2:09 AM

  I blame Adobe, Microsoft and Apple for the common misuse of font instead of typeface.

• by mgoetzke on 12/29/23, 7:59 AM

  Didn't everyone do this exact font in the 80s when we did not have enough room and needed something for eg debug output on our computers ?

• by divbzero on 12/29/23, 6:18 AM

  3×3 pixels is almost certainly the smallest legible font.

  You need at least 6 pixels to encode 27 letters + 10 digits because:

    2⁵ < 37
    2⁶ > 37
  

  But 2×3 pixels seems unlikely to be legible. From 2×3 pixels, you can increment the height to 2×4 pixels or the width to 3×3 pixels. The latter feels more feasible.

• by evertedsphere on 12/29/23, 2:30 AM

  Does anyone remember that one weird block script that people post to HN sometimes? The only thing I remember is that it's the kind of thing that would take a good while to learn to read—maybe the blocks for the letters in a word could be recognised as a single shape when juxtaposed?

• by xarope on 12/29/23, 1:22 AM

  reminds me of the time I'd have the smallest font possible running in xwindows with a server log scrolling in it. I was so used to the pattern of the logs, I'd only need to see a change in said pattern to know something was wrong.

  this would probably have beaten that smallest font back then

• by Kerrick on 12/29/23, 12:20 AM

  A similar concept for print: the Miniscule family, supposedly legible down to 2pt. https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/minuscule/

• by andsoitis on 12/29/23, 9:57 AM

  Some observations:

  - 5 and S are indistinguishable

  - 0 and O are indistinguishable

  - 2 and Z are indistinguishable

  - no lowercase

  While context will generally suffice in making the indistinguishable glyphs understood correctly, there are some use cases where we mix letters and numbers in the same string and those would be ambiguous.

• by layer8 on 12/29/23, 12:42 AM

  With subpixel rendering you could get down to 1x3 (or at least 2x3). ;)

• by userbinator on 12/29/23, 1:32 AM

  That's 9 bits, or 512 total combinations in that grid; thus, theoretically one should be able to fit all of ASCII, but many of the characters would be very difficult to distinguish or recognise.

  (Incidentally, a common 7-segment display can also fit all of ASCII, and if you include a decimal point too, can represent a single byte completely: https://dkeenan.com/7-segment%20ASCII%20characters.txt )

• by seba_dos1 on 12/29/23, 4:44 AM

  Damn, I'm pretty sure I did something similar on a piece of paper when I was a kid. I could have been the "creator of the world's smallest typeface"!

• by simantel on 12/28/23, 10:57 PM

  Not sure I'd be able to read this without context off the bat (especially the E, G, M, and W), but it's an interesting project!

• by justinl33 on 12/29/23, 3:06 AM

  In an ideal world where people are fluent in binary, we would only need 5 pixels. Just imagine how efficient the world could be…

• by shpx on 12/29/23, 4:12 AM

  Smallest monospace typeface. You could make "I" and "1" a single line and make "J"/"L" and "P"/"Q" only 2 pixels wide.

• by avmich on 12/29/23, 1:45 AM

  I think this is a more elaborate approach.

  https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4

• by spiritplumber on 12/29/23, 1:00 PM

  The first two Wing Commander games were great at this. You could read everything and it was still tiny.

• by lencastre on 12/29/23, 11:26 PM

  Try mouse, the smallest pixel font that is surprisingly readable at really small font sizes.

• by tail_exchange on 12/29/23, 12:11 AM

  Any samples with this font? I'd love to see it in action even if it's impossible to read.

• by asylteltine on 12/29/23, 1:44 AM

  Why isn’t the M missing the top center pixel? Seems like it would make it way easier to read

• by Herodotus38 on 12/29/23, 12:17 AM

  Pretty great. I only saw s and 5, as well as q and 9 were the same symbols.

• by tap-snap-or-nap on 12/29/23, 12:40 AM

  0 and O is same.

• by ChrisArchitect on 12/29/23, 4:13 AM

  (2005)

• by klyrs on 12/29/23, 1:28 AM

  Wait til that they figure out that braille is only 3x2...

• by globalnode on 12/29/23, 12:05 AM

  i like it!