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.'"

Original Source

[fotbr]

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

Warning! Source article image is a JPEG.

[Brit_in_the_USA]

If the PNG on the Slashdot article is derived from the linked source article then I am concerned that it may not be representative of the actual research as the source article offers the image as a JPEG - which will almost certainly have degraded the image quality.

Well-known: you only need 3x5 pix

[thisisauniqueid]

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.)

Re:Nice, but... what about a, e, and o?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you check the original source, a e an o are distinguishable: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html [nyu.edu]

What about Asian Fonts?

[Dracker]

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.

Re:Legibility

[sholsinger]

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.

dissolve the political bunds

[Culture20]

Try again. I bet somebody converted to jpg before converting back to png.

Re:Original Source

[noidentity]

And if you don't want to install Java, there's an image of the text [sitepoint.com] (at least I think this is the same, but the author didn't bother putting any on his site so I can't be sure). Not very readable; I think this could be improved on.

Re:Well-known: you only need 3x5 pix

[NixieBunny]

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.