

1 pixel by 5 pixel font - shard
http://distractionware.com/blog/?p=193

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pornel
To me it was illegible until I darkened red and green channels (because blue
is less perceptible)

<http://imgur.com/lAszP.png>

~~~
jasonkester
Still completely illegible on an iPad. Just an endless series of vertical blue
lines with the occasional red dot. I think I made out an exclamation point a
few paragraphs down, but that's it.

~~~
ilbo
Hold it with the home button to the right.

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silvertab
I can figure out some of the words, but I wouldn't really call that font
"legible".

Edit: Well, apparently I didn't even realize it was the lyrics to Never gonna
give you up. Tells you how hard to read the font is! Once you know it though,
the font suddenly becomes much easier to read!

~~~
jerf
This really depends on your display being exactly the same type as the
author's. I have to just about rub my laptop screen on my nose, but once I do
that all the words are perfectly legible for me. (I don't mean _pleasantly_
legible, but I can definitely read it.) If you look at Cleartype or font
smoothing controls, you can see how many types of LCD monitors there have
been.

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boredguy8
A good reminder for anyone doing sub-pixel tweaking: not all monitors are set
up in the same orientation. This is completely illegible with my resolution at
1050 x 1680 (screen rotated 90°).

~~~
pmjordan
Gamma/colour temperature settings also affect this massively. It's nighttime
here, and f.lux has dimmed my screen to make me sleepy. No chance of reading
it. That said, I'm having severe trouble making it out even with f.lux
disabled on all my screens. (30" Cinema HD, old 19" Iiyama - both with VA
panels, and 13" MacBook - TN panel AFAIK)

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blahedo
This font has the unusual property that zooming in (using e.g.
Ctrl+ScrollWheelUp on a Mac) actually makes it _less_ legible.

It does help you appreciate just how small we can make pixels, though. Given
that we can make pixels so small, I wonder if there could be a market for B&W
triple-resolution display? If I valued high-res over colour?

~~~
praptak
_"This font has the unusual property that zooming in (using e.g.
Ctrl+ScrollWheelUp on a Mac) actually makes it less legible."_

Hrm, it's possible to write a zoom tool that emulates the LCD sub-pixel
effects. I bet that people working on such technologies already use one,
otherwise they'd lose their sight squinting at their monitors.

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alanfalcon
For anyone who isn't lucky enough to have an LCD screen that displays this
message properly, I've take a couple of photos (because screenshots obviously
wouldn't work) to show off how clever this is.

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/dafalcon/5204409225/>
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/dafalcon/5204413187/>

~~~
liuliu
It also helped that people recognize English by words not by individual
characters.

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shrikant
My laptop screen must have some gigantic pixels. The "Error Establishing
Database Connection" text looked pretty big to me.

 _Edit_ : Not trying to be a dick, but the site was down for me (and others,
as reported by Down For Everyone...), so here's the Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:distrac...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:distractionware.com/blog/?p=193)

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colinprince
I thought I was immune to rick rolling!

~~~
PedroCandeias
Me too. But I have to hand it to the Op. This is one of the best Rick Rolls I
have ever witnessed.

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msarnoff
I "discovered" this about 2 years ago. It's really only visible with a
magnifying glass or camera with a good macro lens.
<http://msarnoff.org/millitext>

I also made a web-based generator: <http://msarnoff.org/millitextgen>

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andrewcooke
that's neat (i can read it on my laptop screen no problems). years ago i tried
to get a minimal font with no aliasing - it's 2 pixels wide (plus space) and
visible at <http://www.acooke.org/minimal/> and
<http://www.acooke.org/minimal/background.html> (but this cleartype approach
is more readable - mine requires a lot of effort (note that it's best to read
mine at its smallest size - making it bigger does not help because it relies
on using shapes that look like they're blurred out at small sizes))

~~~
jcw
I wouldn't say your font is completely readable, but each character is unique,
so learning to read it would almost be like learning a new alphabet. Perhaps
then one could read it fluently.

After working on it, can you easily read text in your font?

~~~
andrewcooke
It was some years ago. I don't remember ever being able to read it easily and
certainly can't now. The letter "c" was (and is) the worst ("z" too, but it's
hardly used) - the problem is that there are too many small letters for the
central 4 pixels.

The best way I've found to "read" it is to learn "c" and then guess words
given the context and easier letters...

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nene
I think it could be made more legible by having a lowercase font instead. Most
of us are accustomed to recognizing entire words by just the shape of them,
but uppercase text doesn't provide much cues for such pattern-matching.

~~~
silentbicycle
Yeah, lowercase letters have a lot more visual cues - ascenders and
descenders, more variation in width, etc.

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flawawa2
All I see is are tiny pixel lines. Maybe some advanced rendering technology on
my monitor ruins it?

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potatolicious
IPS monitor here - completely illegible. Not all monitors have the same
subpixel properties?

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wildmXranat
Did , did I just get rick rolled ?

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kujawa
Goddamnit, rickrolled again!

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acgourley
Reads fine on my mbp screen, I'm impressed.

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cytzol
Interesting - I made it more legible by holding a camera up to the screen to
magnify the pixels. And now I know what it says, I can read it normally.

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malkia
EULA's should be written using this font :)

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rorrr
It assumes your monitor sub-pixel layout is RGB, where in fact it can be BGR
(reverse order), V-RGB (vertical RGB) and V-BGR (vertical BGR).

<http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php>

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ax0n
Race to the bottom: You're doing it right.

