

World's smallest legible font is not the smallest I've seen - landhar
http://angband.pl/font/tinyfont.html

======
tzs
Mine, from around 1988, looks similar: <http://www.tzs.net/small.html>

I didn't do lower case, though. I created this as a debugging aid when I was
writing SCSI drivers for a third-party Mac drive vendor. I wanted a debug
printf, but since the disk drivers run before the OS runs, the OS facilities
aren't available. I made a debug printf that printed, using my tiny font,
directly to screen memory. Each character is 3x5, so that with one pixel
spacing you can fit a horizontal slice of two characters in a byte, so I
didn't need to write a general bitblt routine.

On modern displays it is hard to read because the dots are so small. On a Mac
Plus built-in display, or a Mac II with a 640x480 or 1024x768 monitor it was
quite legible.

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Groxx
My favorite is still Flea's Knees: <http://typophile.com/node/61920>

I can't find it any more, but I found another once which made characters in
2x3 pixels, relying on the positions of subpixels. Wasn't the _most_ readable,
but you could still make out what was written. _That_ was the smallest.

~~~
henrikschroder
Oh wow, I started reading the comments. That Stonecypher guy is a man on a
mission, but he sure knows what he's talking about. Lots and lots of useful
and fun info about subpixel fonts there.

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silvertab
I did find this guy's font much more readable than the one he linked to! I
could actually read the paragraph without too much squinting!

~~~
kapitalx
This is definitely much more readable. My screen is 15" 19x12 resolution. So
everything looks pretty small, but I could still read this, while the original
one wasn't readable for me.

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drv
I can't really read anything that small on a modern high-res monitor anyway,
but I found this bit at the end interesting:

"in most jurisdictions bitmap fonts are not copyrightable"

Is that really the case? A quick Google finds some articles in agreement, but
I'm no lawyer. If it's true, I'm surprised I haven't seen, for example,
Chicago pop up in more places.

~~~
ars
Yes it's true.

The shape of vector fonts are also not copyrightable, but the actual file is.
So you are free to recreate it if you wish.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_on_typefaces>

~~~
palish
What is the definition of "create"?

For example what if I wrote a program to open the original file, examine the
shapes of the fonts, then write them to a new file?

That would essentially be copy-pasting the file, wouldn't it? But how is that
different from someone using their eyes to "examine the shapes of the fonts
and write them to a new file"? Just because of small inaccuracies?

So what if I wrote a program to _very slightly_ change the shapes of the font?
Did I "create" a new font?

~~~
GHFigs
A font file is not just a compilation of vector shapes. It is essentially a
small (but potentially complex) program describing their proper rasterization
under different conditions. Just copying the shapes as rendered at a certain
size by a certain interpreter doesn't really give you a copy of the original
font.

~~~
shasta
Here's an experiment you can try: write a program that renders a font to a
high res grid, then refits vector data to that data, then publish a bunch of
proprietary fonts redone using your program (documenting your approach
carefully) and see how long it takes to get sued.

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rbanffy
Oh... I wonder what could we do if we had these fonts at the dawn of the
personal computer.

Wait! We had them!

On the Apple II, the Magic Window word processor, could use a 70-column mode
with the graphics screen and a font that was 4 pixels wide. It was 7 pixels
tall, but nobody made a big deal out of that. I am quite sure I had
proportional fonts that could fit in a 4x5 matrix in my developer toolbox (I
did lots of courseware in the mid-80's that ran on Apple IIs). Using similar
fonts, Atari and C=64 computers could do 80-column text screens with this same
approach (both could do 320 pixels per scan line, while the II did only 280)

~~~
lkozma
I used to have a Romanian ZX 81 clone in the early 90s, on which I could
somehow boot CP/M which was really not meant to run on that machine in which
there was an editor called tword that rendered characters in 4x7 pixels to
have double column width (the native mode was 8x8 IIRC). A friend of mine
hacked this editor to be able to display letters with acute accents so that we
could write in Hungarian (he replaced some special characters). We were 11 or
12. I know, "cool story bro" :)

~~~
rbanffy
Cool story, bro :-)

In Brazil we did similar things with accents, but Portuguese is no match for
Hungarian in that regard. Also, my grandpa taught me Rovasirás and I made a
font (Apple IIs had a nice hack for graphical fonts) for it.

I would like to know more about that ZX-81-like computer. We had something
like it here, one that could do 192x256 pixel graphics.

~~~
lkozma
I had one of these: <http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=632>
then later this: <http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=629>

The second one mentions a Brasilian connection :) Yes, the resolution was the
same.

------
frevd
Check out in Windows: \- open console: Start > Run > cmd \- right-click title
bar, select Properties \- select raster font 4x6, which is actually smaller,
has more characters and appears to be even more readable

:p

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davidedicillo
This is not as impressive as some hand written books I've seen in an italian
abbey where the size of the text about the same.

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seanalltogether
"but, a font I created in 2004 for side messages in a MUD client is smaller"

No it's not, his font requires a 320x240 box to display all the text, the
original font fits in a 302x220 box and that even includes ~8-10 pixels of
padding. [http://techhammers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Worlds-
sma...](http://techhammers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Worlds-smallest-
legible-fonts.jpg)

~~~
jmaygarden
"Also, my font is fixed pitch as I needed it to be that rather than
proportional, so you can shave quite a bit more."

Are you taking that into account?

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Semiapies
If you blow up the image of the Declaration text, it's quite readable. I don't
see much use for it today, but it's really a very nice design. I'm skeptical
that a legible font could use any fewer pixels.

~~~
kingsley_20
Pixel font's are still _very_ useful in icons, favicons etc.

------
dzuc
There is a nice thread @ Typophile dealing with a similar situation:
<http://typophile.com/node/61920>

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powrtoch
Subpixel rendering (used in the font referenced in the article) really ought
to count as cheating. It effectively increases the horizontal resolution, so
it can only make a real claim to be "smallest" in the vertical dimension.
Furthermore, if you blow it up (which I'm guessing plenty of people are
inclined to do), it actually looks worse, whereas the true bitmap font
becomes, while clearly pixelated, more legible.

~~~
archangel_one
It's not just when you blow it up - I found the bitmapped font considerably
more legible at 1:1 size. Hinting definitely makes sense at larger sizes, but
when it's that small it tends to look a bit muddy to me.

~~~
Waywocket
Hell yes. Normally I complain that sub-pixel rendering suffers too badly from
colour fringing on any display with a low enough resolution for it to be
worthwhile.

In that case I'd say that the colour fringing suffered a little from having a
hint of font almost visible beneath it, whereas the bitmapped font was
actually pretty decent.

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sammcd
This reminds me of a class I didn't study well for. We where allowed one piece
of computer paper for reference. I printed my friend's entire set of notes for
the class using a VERY small font.

When I was done, he wanted a copy too :)

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tholex
There is a smaller font than both of these two:
<http://typophile.com/node/61920>

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landhar
In reference to: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908679>

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LurkingGrue
Obviously a strange new usage of the word legible that I was not previously
aware of.

Probably due to me being old.

