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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?
ts;dr
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Skip the blogspam, go to the source: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
If the PNG on the Slashdot article is derived from the linked source article then I am concerned that it may not be representative of the actual research as the source article offers the image as a JPEG - which will almost certainly have degraded the image quality.
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.
Tilt your head 90 degrees and you should be alright.
You're welcome.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
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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That looks EXACTLY like the text I was staring at when I was a kid with my CoCo2 running a 72 column display. The fonts were all artifacted and all that. It was tough but it was at least a good thing that I was a kid and capable of dealing with it comfortably. The machine was originally intended to use a 32 column text display, but the 4 color "high res" display was too tempting for some to resist and they decided to write some word processing and desktop software for the thing. It worked...more or less... sorta... intolerable by today's standards but a feat in those days.
Of Perlin noise fame?
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.)
One thing I've noticed while studying Japanese is that I need to use a larger font size when reading Japanese than I do when I'm reading English. The characters are just too complex to differentiate at small font sizes. You can't easily distinguish a character with N horizontal lines without the character being 2N-1 pixels tall (one for each stroke, and another for the gap between strokes). There are common characters with as many as 8 horizontal strokes (The kanji for "kaku" for example, which conveniently means to write). Even today's video games (on nintendo DS, for example) have 11x11 pixel Japanese fonts that can be very difficult to read.
Any reduction in font sizes for readability must have separate standards for Asian characters, or the more complex ones will just appear as blobs.
now it's all upside down!!
you are useless to me!!
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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.
Try again. I bet somebody converted to jpg before converting back to png.
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!
My compound eyes were annoyed trying to read them, and I gave up. :(
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I imagine InstallShield will license these at once for click-through software licenses which need fine print -- really fine print.
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
Agree, this is not legible, especially when enlarged. And, here's my font from a good while ago which is not only slightly smaller (or would be if it was variable pitch) but also a good deal more readable. Can be enlarged without loss, too.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
OK tilt your head 270 degrees instead.
Great! Now I'm dead...
Next news story: "Slashdotter snaps someones neck through the internet."
If it rhymes it must be true.
Now I'm right back where I started and i think I can puke pea green soup.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.