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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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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
I tried that, but the first word was "exercise" which just turned me off from the whole thing.
One time in college, the professor gave out .pdf documents of the class notes. We were allowed to bring three papers with us.
Well, I had this great software that could print four pages on one piece of paper. and the HP laserjet in the lab could do the same thing -- instant 16 pages on one piece of paper. I even brought a loupe into class to help me read such tiny print. Fun days, good class.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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.
Great! Now I'm dead...
Next news story: "Slashdotter snaps someones neck through the internet."
If it rhymes it must be true.