Anyone have some text set in this font so we can all see how easy it is to read?
On my MacBook Air 13" seems like you could fit 640*400 = 256000 characters at once. Which ought to fit, for example, the complete text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
If you can spare extra pixels, Tom Thumb (3x5) [1] is more legible. The upper case M and N are somewhat hard to distinguish without context, but it's the only major flaw compared to this one.
It's one of those weird exceptions that legal systems are full of.
(There might be good reasons for this particular loophole, just like there are good reasons for any other loophole, if you dig deep enough. But the total sum makes for an overly complicated system.)
I wouldn't really call it a loophole, it's explicitly excluded in the law. Given that copyright only applies to original works of a sufficient level of authorship, I think there's a valid perspective that typefaces are excluded.
Yes, not sure whether loophole is the right word. But it's a complication and exception.
> Given that copyright only applies to original works of a sufficient level of authorship, I think there's a valid perspective that typefaces are excluded.
Typefaces are typically a lot more sophisticated than when I'm taking a selfie or jot down some nonsense words and declare it a poem. Yet, the latter two are protected by copyright law.
Well yeah, sophistication isn't part of the criteria for copyright protection. I think the perspective applied here is along the lines that typefaces are more of a tool that authors use, rather than an product of authorship. Likewise, the design of a paintbrush wouldn't be eligible for copyright. Even a very sophisticated paintbrush. Both typefaces and paintbrushes are eligible for patents, though.
Speculating a bit: I think the historical perspective had a much narrower focus on what could be put under copyright. That's why (in the US at least) photographs and movies (and computer code?) wasn't originally included, and only got included over time via judicial decisions.
Typefaces just naturally fell outside of the original narrow focus, and just never got moved into the focus.
as i understand it, that carve-out is included in us copyright law to ensure that you can legally xerox a book with permission from its author (or whoever they transferred the copyright to), without also getting permission from the font designer. in this case it makes the system simpler to navigate rather than more complex
if it's fair use; that may or may not cover every case of 'xerox a book for private use' but certainly the publishers who are suing library genesis under us law don't think it does
There's a lot of text that isn't covered under copyright at all. It would be a circus if widely published content that isn't eligible for copyright was illegal to photocopy because it was printed in a typeface that was.
For example, the IRS official fonts are Helvetica and Times New Roman. If in a hypothetical world, those were eligible for copyright, they'd still be within the duration of eligibility. Would it then be a copyright violation to print my tax form? I think that's silly, and I think the lawmakers who decided this thought the same.
> For example, the IRS official fonts are Helvetica and Times New Roman. If in a hypothetical world, those were eligible for copyright, they'd still be within the duration of eligibility. Would it then be a copyright violation to print my tax form? I think that's silly, and I think the lawmakers who decided this thought the same.
That's a weird hypothetical. Obviously, in that counterfactual world, the IRS would choose fonts that were either in the public domain or had permissive licenses.
Your hypothetical sounds like if speed limits on the highway were lowered, everyone would drive at the old speed and get a ticket, instead of adjusting their behaviour.
You're right, it's a backwards hypothetical. Maybe in that world, NIST would have created a font for all to use.
> the IRS would choose fonts that were either in the public domain or had permissive licenses.
Presuming a suitable option existed at the time, without requiring the government to make one themselves.
It would be silly if, by default, the purchaser of a printing press has no legal right to print anything with it. Maybe we would have lived in a world where typewriter manufacturers had all of the power that publishers had/have, but even broader.
> Obviously, in that counterfactual world, the IRS would choose fonts that were either in the public domain or had permissive licenses.
there's nothing obvious about that at all; there are plenty of times when government agencies don't bend over backwards like that to ensure public access to their public-domain products. remember that what the fbi first investigated aaron swartz for was providing public access to pacer's court electronic records; pacer nominally stands for 'public access to court electronic records'
the westlaw page number fiasco is another example
you could even imagine a government rfq where different font foundries offer the irs the use of their fonts for below-market prices, thus gaining the right to charge people for printing their tax forms. and if you think that's an implausible level of corruption you probably haven't been following the ongoing saga of intuit's lobbying
As computer programs are protected as literary works in the United States, a font file program can only be eligible for copyright protection in the US if the source code of the computer instructions within the file was written by a human; due to the prominence of modern user-friendly digital font editor programs, this method of creating a font file is now quite rare.
Very interesting. IANAL but presumably this means that anyone can trace a font automatically, generating a new one that looks exactly the same, but isn't subject to copyright.
You can, but you'll still end up paying legal fees to defend yourself if Adobe or Monotype comes after you if their rent team sees a public design from a company not on their list.
Maybe it won't matter if you're a hobbyist, but they both go after businesses over alleged unlicensed use.
Not a lawyer, not legal advice. The actual font files (e.g. TTF and OTF) are protected by copyright, but the design itself is not. You can copy the design to the minute details, but you'll have to make your own font. This is a lot of work for hundreds or thousands of glyphs, plus kerning.
The format those files are delivered in generally do not simply contain a typeface. They contain code that draws the typeface, which is a computer program, and that is covered by copyright.
That's pretty cool! A couple years ago I designed a similar 3x5 typeface for Salesloft's icon set.
It was designed with a similar style—outer/inner radius, square terminals—as the icons. Personally, the centered descender on the Q is more clear with tiny typefaces.
For anyone thinking about using this: At some point I tried to do a logo for myself on a 3x3 grid (so pretty much the same as this) and while the text was perfectly readable to me a few people I tested it with couldn't read it.
S and 5 are identical, as are Z and 2, and O and 0 (edit: and Q and 9). No punctuation either; semicolon vs. colon vs. exclamation mark needs creativity. There's no hope for $ or *.
The font in the submission isn't meant to be readable in small physical sizes. It's just meant to use as few pixels as possible.
A font with a higher resolution, ie more pixels or finer coordinates for a vector based one, has a chance to be more readable at smaller physical sizes.
> Not totally sure what I'd use this for.
It's mostly just for fun and artistic expression. The linked article mentions the font being used for some album covers.
I used a 3 pixel wide font extensively back on the '80s to write debug messages to Mac screens from code that could not make use of the normal Mac ROM and OS display functions.
At first this was when writing SCSI disk drivers for a third party Mac disk maker. Later it was when writing network drivers for a company making a SCSI ethernet interface. Then it was when working on firmware for some NuBUS cards for Mac II.
I didn't want to write a full BITBLT, but I didn't want to make width + spacing be 8 pixels because even though that would be very easy it would also mean I could only have 64 characters to a line on the Mac or Mac Plus (512 x 342 display).
With characters 3 pixels wide and 1 space between them you just need a simple BITBLT that only has to handle two cases.
My font was 3x5. Unlike the other 3x5 fonts people have mentioned I didn't try to include lower case. Here's a sample, scaled up by factor of 4:
The reason that there is a prominent visible symbol for newline is because when the debug print got to the bottom of the screen it would wrap back to the top. The prominent newline let you tell which characters on the line came from the latest print on that line.
I used a font similar to this one when watching log files on an xterm back in the '90s and screen space was valuable. Its not "I want to read the lines as they go past" but rather "I want to get a feel for the rate of the lines as they go past and see the 'shape' of the lines". For an access log, regular use looks very different than someone trying to probe the site and that can be determined by the shape of the line - not the text itself.
For that, if you wanted to see what was going on, a quick copy and paste of the text into a regular editor will show you the characters at a reasonable size.
reminds me of the time I'd have the smallest font possible running in xwindows with a server log scrolling in it. I was so used to the pattern of the logs, I'd only need to see a change in said pattern to know something was wrong.
this would probably have beaten that smallest font back then
That's 9 bits, or 512 total combinations in that grid; thus, theoretically one should be able to fit all of ASCII, but many of the characters would be very difficult to distinguish or recognise.
this is actually 4×4 if you're counting pixels needed on the output device instead of rom space needed; another, more comprehensive font of the same size is https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4
the same problem happens with the public-domain 'tom thumb' font pushfoo linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38800409. it is actually 4×6 (24 output pixels) but claims to be 3×5
i think you could do better by using grayscale for antialiasing, and as rafabulsing pointed out, matt sarnoff's millitext http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ uses subpixel antialiasing to get very readable text at 1⅔×5 pixels
The Atari ST came with a 6x6 font, including spacing: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/876150/atari_st_6 - 5x5 means no compromises required for upper case letters, which are all readable, and punctuation is intelligible. The liberties taken with lower case are probably acceptable.
(Been years since I saw this font in situ so I'm not sure what it'd look like if you have two adjacent rows of text! Probably mostly OK, but I bet some letters would meet. The ST's OS used this font for icon labels, so there was always a gap.)
in the text modes of old computers, there isn't anything to separate one character from those next to it, so that space has to be in the character itself.
Why is it "actually 4x4"? Are you counting the space between the letters?
I think 3x3 is just as reasonable to describe this, because every character is 3x3 pixels, and this spacing is not really a font property. e.g. the mentioned album cover is an example (which would be "3.1x3.1"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheath_(album)
just to clarify, the 4×6 font is (at least mostly, maybe entirely, I don't remember) the work of Janne V. Kujala in 4x6.bdf, as distributed by Markus Kuhn and now included in XFree86 (and presumably X.org, unless they've dropped BDFs entirely). The XLFD is -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--6-60-75-75-c-40-iso10646-1, so you can try it by running
Does anyone remember that one weird block script that people post to HN sometimes? The only thing I remember is that it's the kind of thing that would take a good while to learn to read—maybe the blocks for the letters in a word could be recognised as a single shape when juxtaposed?
The only one I remember is Flea's Knees, which uses specific colors for each pixel and depends on the RGB layout of LCD subpixels to effectively triple the horizontal resolution. The letters are 4 pixels wide and relatively very tall.
116 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadI highly recommended it. :)
On my MacBook Air 13" seems like you could fit 640*400 = 256000 characters at once. Which ought to fit, for example, the complete text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Tom Thumb is also Public Domain (CC0).
[1] https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
(There might be good reasons for this particular loophole, just like there are good reasons for any other loophole, if you dig deep enough. But the total sum makes for an overly complicated system.)
> Given that copyright only applies to original works of a sufficient level of authorship, I think there's a valid perspective that typefaces are excluded.
Typefaces are typically a lot more sophisticated than when I'm taking a selfie or jot down some nonsense words and declare it a poem. Yet, the latter two are protected by copyright law.
Typefaces just naturally fell outside of the original narrow focus, and just never got moved into the focus.
For example, the IRS official fonts are Helvetica and Times New Roman. If in a hypothetical world, those were eligible for copyright, they'd still be within the duration of eligibility. Would it then be a copyright violation to print my tax form? I think that's silly, and I think the lawmakers who decided this thought the same.
That's a weird hypothetical. Obviously, in that counterfactual world, the IRS would choose fonts that were either in the public domain or had permissive licenses.
Your hypothetical sounds like if speed limits on the highway were lowered, everyone would drive at the old speed and get a ticket, instead of adjusting their behaviour.
> the IRS would choose fonts that were either in the public domain or had permissive licenses.
Presuming a suitable option existed at the time, without requiring the government to make one themselves.
It would be silly if, by default, the purchaser of a printing press has no legal right to print anything with it. Maybe we would have lived in a world where typewriter manufacturers had all of the power that publishers had/have, but even broader.
(I say presumably, because most likely those laws replaced some earlier similar regulations.)
there's nothing obvious about that at all; there are plenty of times when government agencies don't bend over backwards like that to ensure public access to their public-domain products. remember that what the fbi first investigated aaron swartz for was providing public access to pacer's court electronic records; pacer nominally stands for 'public access to court electronic records'
the westlaw page number fiasco is another example
you could even imagine a government rfq where different font foundries offer the irs the use of their fonts for below-market prices, thus gaining the right to charge people for printing their tax forms. and if you think that's an implausible level of corruption you probably haven't been following the ongoing saga of intuit's lobbying
Very interesting. IANAL but presumably this means that anyone can trace a font automatically, generating a new one that looks exactly the same, but isn't subject to copyright.
Maybe it won't matter if you're a hobbyist, but they both go after businesses over alleged unlicensed use.
It was designed with a similar style—outer/inner radius, square terminals—as the icons. Personally, the centered descender on the Q is more clear with tiny typefaces.
https://solomon.io/salesloft-icon-fundamentals/#alphanum
oop!
And this is more of an art project than anything else.
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Silkscreen
A font with a higher resolution, ie more pixels or finer coordinates for a vector based one, has a chance to be more readable at smaller physical sizes.
> Not totally sure what I'd use this for.
It's mostly just for fun and artistic expression. The linked article mentions the font being used for some album covers.
At first this was when writing SCSI disk drivers for a third party Mac disk maker. Later it was when writing network drivers for a company making a SCSI ethernet interface. Then it was when working on firmware for some NuBUS cards for Mac II.
I didn't want to write a full BITBLT, but I didn't want to make width + spacing be 8 pixels because even though that would be very easy it would also mean I could only have 64 characters to a line on the Mac or Mac Plus (512 x 342 display).
With characters 3 pixels wide and 1 space between them you just need a simple BITBLT that only has to handle two cases.
My font was 3x5. Unlike the other 3x5 fonts people have mentioned I didn't try to include lower case. Here's a sample, scaled up by factor of 4:
https://imgur.com/a/I97Zi6l
The reason that there is a prominent visible symbol for newline is because when the debug print got to the bottom of the screen it would wrap back to the top. The prominent newline let you tell which characters on the line came from the latest print on that line.
For that, if you wanted to see what was going on, a quick copy and paste of the text into a regular editor will show you the characters at a reasonable size.
https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/
this would probably have beaten that smallest font back then
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal
(Incidentally, a common 7-segment display can also fit all of ASCII, and if you include a decimal point too, can represent a single byte completely: https://dkeenan.com/7-segment%20ASCII%20characters.txt )
https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4
Still, the 3x3 ends up working due to context a lot. I wonder if there is a 3x4 or 4x3.
It won't render nice here because of line spacing and unicode but it should work fine in the terminal.
See also another 3x3 font and someone else's figlet port of that one:
https://fakoo.de/en/fakoo/fakoo-ttf.html
https://brontosaurusrex.github.io/2021/05/18/3x3-typeface/
the same problem happens with the public-domain 'tom thumb' font pushfoo linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38800409. it is actually 4×6 (24 output pixels) but claims to be 3×5
it can be accessed despite tls problems at http://web.archive.org/web/20230828193815/https://robey.lag.... but says 'Please do not post this article to Hacker News.'
my own 4×6 font is demonstrated at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dofonts-1k.html, where it fits into a 1024-byte web page along with all the logic needed to render ascii text with it; but the proportional font i used in http://canonical.org/~kragen/bible-columns (rendered with http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/propfontr...) is at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/6-pixel-1... and is slightly smaller; it averages 21.5 pixels per character. this is more than anders de flon's so-called 3×3, which is 16 pixels per character, but it supports the full character set, if you think ascii is the full character set anyway. so does simplifier's 4×4 font
i think you could do better by using grayscale for antialiasing, and as rafabulsing pointed out, matt sarnoff's millitext http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ uses subpixel antialiasing to get very readable text at 1⅔×5 pixels
(Been years since I saw this font in situ so I'm not sure what it'd look like if you have two adjacent rows of text! Probably mostly OK, but I bet some letters would meet. The ST's OS used this font for icon labels, so there was always a gap.)
What do you mean by this? Each character requires only a 3x3 grid of pixels to draw.
I think 3x3 is just as reasonable to describe this, because every character is 3x3 pixels, and this spacing is not really a font property. e.g. the mentioned album cover is an example (which would be "3.1x3.1"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheath_(album)
on the album cover it looks like the characters are about 1000×1000 pixels each, which is why it's possible to put an extra small space between them
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127419
just to clarify, the 4×6 font is (at least mostly, maybe entirely, I don't remember) the work of Janne V. Kujala in 4x6.bdf, as distributed by Markus Kuhn and now included in XFree86 (and presumably X.org, unless they've dropped BDFs entirely). The XLFD is -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--6-60-75-75-c-40-iso10646-1, so you can try it by running
My proportional n×6 and 3×n fonts are derived from it.here i'm talking about my 4×6 font, not tom thumb
CJK comfortably fits