

Two Teeny Tiny Fonts - bensummers
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/09/22/two-teeny-tiny-fonts/

======
qjz
At the other (and more preferable) end of the solution: What current
technology offers the most pixels per square inch? How far away are we from a
1080p PDA/smartphone screen?

~~~
shalmanese
LCD Projectors fit 1080p in ~0.75" diagonal for roughly 3000 pixels per square
inch. That seems to be roughly the limit of our technology.

~~~
Retric
As a side note 4x 1080p projectors fit with that assumption.

 _The 4K resolution of the new panel, which measures 1.64-inches diagonally,
translates to 8.85 megapixels and is four times the resolution of full HD_
<http://www.gizmag.com/epson-2160p-lcd-projector-panel/13333/>

------
JoeAltmaier
Subpixel Abe Lincoln <http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/fcs_mosaic/>

~~~
jrockway
Why blur the serial number on the money? Is someone really going to find the
bill, notice it has cocaine on it, and blame the author of the blog post?

------
10ren
Work amazingly well. Is there a barrier to this being available as an ordinary
font?

> In contrast, I’ve noticed that Microsoft’s smallest screen fonts are
> unreadable, whereas their smallest readable screen fonts are way bigger than
> necessary. “

Interesting, given ClearType (an example in "Microsoft’s Creative Destruction"
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100377>): "It worked by using the color
dots of liquid crystal displays to make type much more readable on the screen"

------
Hates_
I've yet to find a download link for the first font "The Bee’s Knees".

~~~
bensummers
The original and best: <http://minifonts.com/mini7.html>

But not as small, of course.

~~~
JayNeely
I find Silkscreen to be the tiny-font of choice.

And it's free: <http://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/>

------
petercooper
BTW, if you want to quickly see how this text looks on an iPhone, etc, I made
a shortlink direct to the demo image so it's easier to type on there..
<http://bit.ly/tinytext>

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Note that as it relies on subpixels it'll only work as intended in one
orientation on iPhone.

~~~
petercooper
This is something that's bugging me about the iPad. Since the screen is
1024x768 (and TFTs are typically manufactured in portrait), I wonder if the
pixels are oriented vertically rather than horizontally when you're in
portrait mode. If so, the font rendering for books could be horrible compared
to if you had it in landscape.

Anyone got any ideas/insight on this?

~~~
pyre
Would it be possible in the future to supplement our existing font formats to
have two versions, one for subpixels one way, and one for the other (so that
the OS could transparently switch between which version to use)? Or am I
misunderstanding how subpixel fonts work?

~~~
henrikschroder
That depends on if it's a bitmap font or not. If it is bitmap, then it's
already subpixel rendered, and you would need two different bitmaps depending
on orientation. If it's truetype or similar, you would need a font renderer
that was capable of subpixel rendering, and it would then have to render it
differently depending on orientation.

However, subpixel rendering works because you effectively triple the
_horizontal_ resolution. If you flip your screen, you now have normal
horizontal resolution, but triple the vertical resolution, which is less
useful for rendering fonts, and it would of course also not look the same as
the horizontally subpixel-rendered font.

So for devices like that, it's probably best to simply not do it and get a
dense enough display that you won't need it.

Also, does anyone know if subpixel rendering works on OLED screens?

------
Mark_B
If nothing else, be sure to check out the Ken Perlin's homepage (he's the guy
behind the second font). <http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/>

------
chaosmachine
That second font was created by Ken Perlin, of Perlin Noise fame.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1105632>

------
petercooper
If we could render Hacker News with this system, think of how many more
stories we could get on the front page. I vote Aye.

------
arnorhs
How well, if at all, do these fonts scale upwards?

~~~
romland
It's a bitmap font, so it scales as any pixels would but far from well when it
comes to readability. If you look at the 1600% up-scale you get a good idea
what I am talking about.

I remember making these types of fonts myself back in the Amiga days just to
fit it on bootsector(s) (memory fails me here, was it one or two?). The
difference then was that sub pixel rendering was not an option, and fixed
width fonts at this size always looked bad (i vs m), so you'd have to be
careful how you wrote things. :-)

Without having ever experimented with subpixel rendering I am intrigued by the
fact that « is made a whole lot more "blue" than » -- spontaneously one would
think it would simply be a matter of mirroring the glyphs (obviously not) :)

~~~
thristian
If you want to experiment with subpixel rendering, and you have a reasonably
modern Firefox, I made a subpixel-rendering toy a while ago:
<http://zork.net/~st/Toys/subpixel-sketch.html>

If you don't have a modern Firefox, there's a screenshot here:
<http://zork.net/~st/Toys/subpixel-sketch.png>

~~~
PebblesRox
That's neat, but I wish I could click and drag to change multiple pixels at
once, instead of clicking and clicking and clicking.

