Smallest possible bitmap font

[NickJohnson]

I personally like small fonts. They take up less space, you can make higher resolution ASCII art with them, and you can see more of your code at a time. I also have relatively little screen space on my laptop, which makes them useful for me. I was wondering what the absolutely smallest two color font size is that can display all ASCII printable characters is.

I know you can do it pretty easily with 8 by 8, and I've seen 5x7 on some consoles. I've even seen 3x5 on the TI-84 used sometimes, but I'm not sure it can handle all lower case characters. It would be cool if it was 3x5, because then you could use a 15/16 bit integer to define any possible character, and have some nice display capabilities for a text console.

Any world records for smallest font?

[Combuster]

Any world records for smallest font?

How about 1mm letters, etched into paper with a sharp point

IMO 3x5 won't work, you'd get no spacing between characters. 5x7 would probably be sufficient to get all characters readable. I'd use 5x8 for small fonts (4x7 usable pixels), so that f.x. the 8 would have the right aspect ratios. In the end, it's all a tradeoff. For real efficiency, try braille

$.02

[Troy Martin]

A single pixel?

[NickJohnson]

Well, I was sort of not counting the one pixel spacing around everything. By 3x5 I really mean 4x6.

[Troy Martin]

You don't necessarily _need_ space....

[NickJohnson]

Hmm... good point.

Although, it would also be very interesting to have a whole font that would be essentially visual braille. I wonder if that would be readable with some getting used to. I mean, the whole design concept of braille is to be able to easily read very simple patterns of dots, so it may actually work well.

[NickJohnson]

I looked it up, and there actually is an ASCII Braille specification, but it only has 64 configurations. If you added an extra dot or dots, you could even have it represent all printable and unprintable ASCII characters. Maybe it would be a good way of reading both normal text and binary files, as an alternative to hexadecimal. Think if you could actually *read* object files. Plus you could look very cool doing it

[Firestryke31]

I had come up with an almost-readable 4x5 (3x4 by your convention) font at one point, but I think I accidentally deleted the bitmap. Also, it was only displayable standard ASCII. It's not that hard to remake though, seeing as there are only about 3 or 4 thousand possible combinations and only a select few of those could be considered letters or numbers. I'll see if I can do it again...

Edit: Here, this is what I came up with. Good luck reading it...


If anyone wants to improve it be my guest.

[NickJohnson]

That's crazy small! I did my best to emulate the TI-84 small sized font, 3x5 or 4x6, whatever you want to call it, which is attached. I can't actually find my calculator right now, so it's probably not exactly the same. Some characters are tricky at that size ($ and # etc.), but the upper case letters and numbers look really nice. I'm guessing nobody's going to try and code Perl in this .

Edit: made some modifications to the more crappy characters. The tilde is now more of a logical not symbol, because that's really what it's for (in C). Similar with the asterisk.

[Troy Martin]

Here's my take on Firestryke's font:

font.png (857 Bytes) Viewed 7714 times

[Masterkiller]

Here is my modification of small font. Actually I made it especially for numbers. I just added the other symbols. I am a little lazy at the moment so follow the characters from my keyboard (qwerty standard), not ASCII.

P.S. All Chars are 3x5

[Osbios]

I did a 4x4 once in pascal for the mode 13h.

[Firestryke31]

Let's see it! And Troy, nice job getting everything into "4x5 safe" boxes (i.e. with the 1px spacing), I tried to do that but couldn't keep it as readable. Also, you messed up the '[' (out of place pixel at bottom should move left 1).

[Troy Martin]

Haha, never noticed that, thanks!

[NickJohnson]

I made some modifications to Troy's modifications, mostly to make things look more even:

font.png (681 Bytes) Viewed 7489 times

It's kind of crazy to think that even on a [edit] 4x6 character (3x5 usable area, including bottom line), there are 32,768 different combinations of pixels. Maybe using some sort of genetic modification program (like the one in the GIMP flame fractal generator), and a few people, we could generate the absolute best possible font.