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The World's Smallest Legible Font

Posted by samzenpus on from the because-he-can dept.

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.'"

11 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Comment by MyLongNickName · · Score: 5, Funny

    ts;dr

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  2. Original Source by fotbr · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. Re:Legibility by oldspewey · · Score: 5, Funny

    Tilt your head 90 degrees and you should be alright.

    You're welcome.

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  4. Well-known: you only need 3x5 pix by thisisauniqueid · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.)

    1. Re:Well-known: you only need 3x5 pix by NixieBunny · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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  5. Re:Legibility by ArsonSmith · · Score: 4, Funny

    now it's all upside down!!

    you are useless to me!!

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  6. Re:Legibility by sholsinger · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Easy to Test by demonbug · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  8. My attempts by KiloByte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
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  9. Re:Legibility by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Great! Now I'm dead...

  10. Re:Legibility by supertrinko · · Score: 4, Funny

    Next news story: "Slashdotter snaps someones neck through the internet."

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