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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.'"
Reading the font is also made easier by virtue of it being a text many of us would recognize. Our minds would fill in the gaps, even if it wasn't completely legible. I suspect it would be harder to read a paragraph with font that small if the text was completely unfamiliar.
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How many words can fit on the 3 by 5 inch flash card? Equations? Diagrams?
Just read it backwards, word for word. I have to admit it was a bit harder, but it was still legible for me. Considering that this is maybe three point font, I find it pretty noteworthy.
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That's pretty amazing. Except that the letters a, e, and o are nearly indistinguishable. To prove it is the smallest legible font, one would have to show that a long enough sequence of just the letters a, e and o could be spelled back by a reader. aeoeoaoeoeoaoeoaoeeeoaaaoeoaoa. I doubt it.
Practically speaking, that would mean a word like onomatopeia would be hard to identify. Of course, the context in which a word shows up probably accounts for more than half of the reason a reader can identify that word so quickly in a sentence.
I was able to read it pretty well, but I think that was due in no small part to it being familiar content. If it weren't the Declaration of Independence, I probably would have had to strain a bit, so it probably has as much to do with gestalt theory as anything else.
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I'd like to see Microsoft designing a font like this. Of course they wouldn't be able to, since they suck and all.
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Even worse, for those who can't read that tiny fonts (whether it is because they have high-DPI displays or just plain bad eyesight), it doesn't help to zoom in on the bitmapped text -- it becomes an illegible mess because it relies on subpixel scaling, which doesn't zoom.
Anyhow, legibility is in the eye of the beholder. What's the smallest legible font for one person won't be for the next. Which is why we let people choose their own fonts these days.
The 1990s are calling -- they want their bitmapped fonts back!
"Reading the font is also made easier by virtue of it being a text many of us would recognize."
Personally, I recognise it because this looks like any other sans serif ~8 pixel-high font from any low-res game of the early 90s or so. Nothing special AT ALL here.