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I was so confused why "o" in the example was wider than "o" written myself - until I understood that example has it capitalized... That seems useless

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.

Also https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font

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.

I'm blown away. I'd have sworn that wasn't possible. It's brilliant. Bravo.

Capital H is cursed... unconnected pixels, indistinguishable from 'ii' or "II". The concept's cool, but for this one point the wrong choice was made.

Really like that zero glyph. I wonder if, instead of Roman numerals, one could use ligatures to encode numeric strings as binary… 42 as 010101

(I sort of randomly picked 42, didn't know it was such an interesting string… Douglas Adams must have known that)

Very cool - note that lowercase b, l and h are the same

Meanwhile, 3x5 fonts are actually usable.

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?

I wish I had this back capability when I used to program my TI graphing calculators back in highschool!

> You can probably read this, even if you wish you couldn't.

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.

I wonder if it's possible to train to read text encoded as one colored pixel per letter, or even per token.

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)

A thread last year with lots of related subpixel type things:

Nanofont3x4: Smallest readable 3x4 font with lowercase (2015)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39735675

I can't really read anything with that, so somewhat readable is very moot.

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?

Pity there's no italics ...

SCNR

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.

Is it just me or the s Z and z S should be swapped?

Love this. Brings so much joy. Try some punctuation. Hilarity ensues.

Cool. I hate it.