There's a whole subculture for fonts smaller than 8 by 8, with real world uses for things such as small LED displays, for example. This is at the extreme end, though.
With the gap, it's effectively three pixels wide. Basically a 3x5 font with one pixel chopped off.
On some displays, you can also divide RGB into three subpixels (R, G, and B stripes). A 3x5 pixel font (9x5 subpixels) can be drawn as a 6x5 subpixel font instead (a 2x5 pixel font).
okay but what about "c" being nearly the same as "z", neither of which look like the character and are nearly(?) identical. Is our brain supposed to just be able to figure it out?
I love this. It speaks to me in a similar ways as a lot of the AI zeitgeist—why shouldn’t we optimize for how the brain actually operates at scale versus hundreds-years-old ideas about ligatures designed for reading in candlelight? (In the AI case, a romanticism for having to learn and prove memory in such a rote way)
Some of the characters/words (particularly "c"/"can") sort of look like they've been cropped from the top, trusting the brain to fill in the bottom half. Reminds me of what Sandisk did with the "S" in their redesign. I wonder if there's any research behind this?
The Atari 2600 had pretty good vertical resolution (assuming you could set up the next line in 76 cycles) but limited horizontal resolution. A 3x5 font is possible, but good luck distinguishing N from M.
This font seems to use characters up to 5 pixels wide, which helps with its near-legibility.
I think readability is helped a lot by the low entropy of English words and sentences, i.e. if you can’t make out one letter, you’ll probably get it anyway from the context.
It’s not so readable if you test it with random strings.
This brings back fond memories from the 8-bit era. Tasword II was a text processor for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum where the developers resorted to extra-narrow fonts to cope with the Speccy's very limited (256x192) screen resolution.
The lower screenshot in [1] provides a glimpse of what seems to be a 3px wide font.
OP's 2px width are a bit too extreme for my taste though.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 53.4 ms ] threadAlso https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font
On some displays, you can also divide RGB into three subpixels (R, G, and B stripes). A 3x5 pixel font (9x5 subpixels) can be drawn as a 6x5 subpixel font instead (a 2x5 pixel font).
This font seems to use characters up to 5 pixels wide, which helps with its near-legibility.
(I sort of randomly picked 42, didn't know it was such an interesting string… Douglas Adams must have known that)
Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase (2015)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39735675
Um... Nope. I can't.
I can get some of the letters, but not most of them, unfortunately.
Love the concept, and the art, that goes into things like this. But I just cannot read it.*
* I have nerve problems in my eyes. I'm not legally blind... Most of the time.
It’s not so readable if you test it with random strings.
SCNR
OP's 2px width are a bit too extreme for my taste though.
[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4000080/Timex/Tasword_...
https://github.com/Warren2060/ChillBitmap
https://github.com/scott0107000/BoutiqueBitmap7x7
I for one would say this is not generally usable and has a limited scope.
Interesting nonetheless.