The World's Smallest Legible Font

hasanabbas1987 writes "From the article: 'Well 'technically' they aren't the smallest fonts in the world as if they were you wouldn't be able to read even a single letter, but, you should be able to read the entire paragraph in the picture given above... we did. A Computer science professor called Ken Perlin designed these tiny fonts and you can fit 500 reasonable words in a resolution of 320 x 240 space. There are at the moment the smallest legible fonts in the world.'"

Comments

Original Source

[fotbr]

Skip the blogspam, go to the source: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

Well-known: you only need 3x5 pix

[thisisauniqueid]

Did Ken Perlin not come through the 8-bit era? "Everybody knows" you can fit the entire English alphabet comfortably into a 3 pixel wide by 5 pixel high monospaced grid, it's been done hundreds of times. (Proportional can be even smaller, of course.)

Re:Well-known: you only need 3x5 pix

[NixieBunny]

You can't quite do that, since he's got both upper and lower case. Besides, he's playing with the RGB subpixels, which makes it trickier. Of course, the early computers like Apple ][ pushed the capabilities of NTSC color TV sets to the point that white pixels would pulsate in blue or yellow due to the chroma subcarrier phase shift (look that up), so they were sorta working at the subpixel level.

I spent a good bit of time designing 5x7 fonts back then, since I was heavily into display hardware back when it took a board full of TTL to make a 256 x 128 pixel text display.

Re:Legibility

[sholsinger]

The problem is that these fonts are designed for LCD displays that are RGBRGB horizontally, not vertically. So rotating any display while using these fonts reduces the legibility due to the sub-pixel optimizations that have been done to make the font legible at it's size.