5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens

by zdw • 3 months ago

822 162 3 months ago

lostmsu• 3 months ago

Small g is unreadable. I obviously know the alphabet and despite that it took quite some time to understand what letter is that.

bartvk• 3 months ago

Perhaps they should've used something similar to the 9. However then it wouldn't really look like a lower-case g.

antraip• 3 months ago

Here is how I would personally modify lowercase g:

   xxx
  x   x
  xxxxx
      x
  xxxx

It looks a bit like a 9 but the descender is different.

(Could play around with how many x's to put on the first and third lines, particularly whether to set the first/last bits on those lines as "corners" or make it more rounded.)

I would also modify the top of lowercase e in a similar fashion.

eichin2• 3 months ago

From using Okidata printers back in the day, a "tall" lower case g really does look bad in running text. (The similarity to the e is a little troublesome, but I don't have a fix for that...)

ramses0• 3 months ago

...and don't forget "twoslice": https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html

I haven't done the pixel-by-pixel deviation checking, but they may be comparable and independently derived!

Nnnes• 3 months ago

See also Picket Right, 2 pixels wide (7 high) and still readable: https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font

graybeardhacker• 3 months ago

Can people read that? I want to do a study to see the cognitive difference between people who can read that and those who can't.

I can't at all.

JoshTriplett7• 3 months ago

I could read every word at nearly full speed, with the exception of "tends" that required a lot of puzzling out.

But I'm backfilling a lot of information from context, the same way that this works: https://www.dictionary.com/articles/typoglycemia

It would have been much harder to read a series of random words, or another piece of text with a less predictable structure.

GaryBluto• 3 months ago

I tried copying a random line of text, pasted it into the textbox and could read most of it. Only a few words tripped me up.

dfox• 3 months ago

IIRC the really cheap Casio Organizers/DataBanks of 90's used 5x5 font. And then my ex used something like that on linux in order to fit a ridiculous amount of xterms onto 14" CRT (somewhat absurd feat with her congenital vision defect).

IvanK_net6• 3 months ago

Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already.

It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).

JoshTriplett7• 3 months ago

Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore.

https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfal12856a00151b-128x56... - 128x56

https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfag12864u4nfi-128x64-t... - 128x64

There's a whole world of embedded devices with wide varieties of screen resolutions.

IvanK_net6• 3 months ago

That is not a tiny screen, it has over 7 thousand pixels.

I think you will not be able to read 5x5 pixel letters on that display (a letter would be about 1 mm tall).

compiler-guy• 3 months ago

Quick browsing at adafruit.com (or any other similar vendor), reveals plenty of displays that are 128, 240, and 320 pixels wide. At 6 pixels of width per character, that's only 21, 40, and 53 characters wide. Seems quite useful to me.

There are also several 32x32 led panels, which one could imagine needing some text.

Also, this kind of thing is just interesting, regardless of the usefulness.

sophacles3• 3 months ago

There exist plenty of reasons to colorize grayscale photos in 2026.

* a huge corpus of historical imagery

* cheaper grayscale cameras + post processing will surely enable all sorts of uses we haven't imagined yet.

* a lower power CCD and post-processing after the fact or on a different device allows for better power budget in cheap drones (etc).

* these algorithms can likely be tuned or used as a stepping stone for ones that convert non-visible wavelengths into color images.

And that's just off the top of my head as someone who doesn't really work with that stuff. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons I can't think of.

IvanK_net6• 3 months ago

Grayscale cameras are not that much cheaper than color cameras. And if you decided to use a grayscale camera on purpose, you probably do not care about the color information (which would be totally "made up" by the colorizing algorithm).

Also, if there are only grayscale photos of you, you were probably born before 1900, and all your friends or your children (who might want to colorize your photo) are probably dead, too.

joefourier2• 3 months ago

Too bad "tiny screens" pretty much do not exist anymore. Screens with hundreds of pixels on each side are very cheap already.

Find me a 0.66" OLED display for ~$1 that has hundreds of pixels on each side then.

It reminds me people who research "colorizing grayscale photos", which do not exist anymore either (if you want a color photo of someone you met in your life, there probably exists a color photo of that person).

What train of thought led you to think people are primarily researching colorising new B&W photos? As opposed to historical ones, or those of relatives taken when they were young? You can take a colour photo of granddad today but most likely the photos of him in his 20s are all in black and white.

IvanK_net6• 3 months ago

If you know a person who is 70 years old, they were 20 in 1975 - color photos existed back then.

Every grayscale photo of someone famous has already been colorized during the past 50 years. If there are only grayscale photos of you, you were probably born before 1900, and all your friends or your children (who might want to colorize your photo) are probably dead, too.

akavel2• 3 months ago

There's a really nice, very low-power, 84x48 B&W LCD screen still widely available for electronics use, a clone of a Nokia 5110 screen - see e.g.:

- https://github.com/akavel/clawtype#clawtype

- mandatory "Bad Apple" vid (not mine): https://youtu.be/v6HidvezKBI

(for the "splash screen" linked above I used font u8g2_font_3x5im_te: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/struct.u8... and a multilingual u8g2_font_tiny5_t_all: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/struct.u8...)

kevin_thibedeau2• 3 months ago

Terminals are tiny screens.

alnwlsn• 3 months ago

I wish that were the case. I'm trying to make a tiny emulated z80 computer, and to fit a screen of 64x16 test on a smartwatch sized screen, I have to use a 4x6 pixel font, because the highest res, most available screen I can get in that size is just 240x280. High-res 400+ px smartwatch screens like the apple watch has - you can only get those if you buy 10000 at once and sign an NDA.

Actually, the 4x6 doesn't look half bad if viewed at wrist-level.

128x64 monochrome screens are very common in both LCD and OLED format.

JoshTriplett7• 3 months ago

These look great.

I would have loved to have seen a sample of the 4x5, not just the 5x5.

DonThomasitos• 3 months ago

Incomplete blog post! Where was the comparison vs. a 1x1 pixel font?

FelipeCortez• 3 months ago

1x5 can also work if you take advantage of subpixel rendering https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/

rossant• 3 months ago

Whoa, amazing!

dorianmariecom• 3 months ago

"if you look closely at the screen"

Tade0• 3 months ago

My child has one of those "Kids' microscopes":

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kids'-Microscopes/zgbs/t...

Magnification is around 5x, but this is more than enough to see subpixels.

JohnDotAwesome• 3 months ago

Amazing. I zoomed in with my phone on the generated image and was surprised to see I could just make out the text! https://storage.j0.hn/subpixelfont.png - Also wow my screen is dirty af

jkonline• 3 months ago

Suggest you check your .htaccess (or however you secure your server) for storage.j0.hn.

throwaway27448• 3 months ago

It seems like you need 2x5 for legibility

CGMthrowaway• 3 months ago

I was annoyed that all the images of the pixel fonts were larger than they actually ostensibly would be on a tiny screen, so I zoomed out my browser all the way on macbook pro retina screen, only to find the tiny letters of the blog text were 100x more readable than any of the pixel fonts in the post.

And if the pixel font images were to be rendered at actually 5 pixels on my Retina screen, because the resolution of Retina screen is so tiny, the pixel fonts would still be unreadable without a microscope.

So while it's a cool project, as long as we can put Retina-dense screens in things, we are past the point where there is any useful need for a 5 pixel font

bagels• 3 months ago

$30 devices don't have apple screens.

cafebabbe• 3 months ago

Retro games

Electronic devices

Fine prints in images

benj1113• 3 months ago

FTA "Even a low-resolution 384x288 display has 110 thousand pixels: way too big to fit in the AVRs memory"

FrostKiwi• 3 months ago

Actually blown away by how good that works with my 1920x1200 8-bit HP Z24n G2 monitor [1] and my Laptop's 1920x1080 6-bit Panel [2]

[2x5-HP-Z24n-G2] https://i.imgur.com/yLyrpfg.jpeg

[1x5-HP-Z24n-G2] https://i.imgur.com/Z7kH005.jpeg

[2x5-Innolux-N156HCA-GA3] https://i.imgur.com/F4Ypxwj.jpeg

[1x5-Innolux-N156HCA-GA3] https://i.imgur.com/etkot5o.jpeg

[1] https://jp.ext.hp.com/monitors/business/z_z24n_g2/

[2] https://www.panelook.com/N156HCA-GA3__15.6__overview_33518.h...

benj1113• 3 months ago

The content isn't viewable in my area. Presumably the UK has rules about minimum font sizes.

snthpy• 3 months ago

I couldn't make out the 1x5 properly but the 2x5 was totally readable.

dlevine• 3 months ago

Subpixel rendering only gives you 3 effective pixels. M and N aren't really readable with less than 5.

dcanelhas• 3 months ago

I figured 2x4 would be the theoretical minimum since ascii characters are 1 byte each (without extensions). 1x5 with color is impressive, even if it is sort of like a faux 3x5

account42• 3 months ago

Not all displays have a simple horizontal subpixel layout though.

iamjackg2• 3 months ago

I actually thought of this (or a previous similar project? The one posted here seems more recent...) just a few days ago while watching the announcement video for this new DJ device, since it seems to use a 5x5 font: https://driftdj.com/dj-hybrid

botanrice2• 3 months ago

yo! thanks for sharing, this is a wicked cool device. I've always wanted a "pocket" mixer to take with me on planes and trains. I know there are smaller devices that can perform that duty but their more like repurposed EQ or audio interfaces that can be used to mix.

but wowza!! $900 for that lil guy, dang!

iamjackg2• 3 months ago

I know, it looks incredible. It popped up on my YouTube feed and I got super excited, but then I thought "I bet this is going to be at least $800." I was wrong in the worst possible way.

bmurray7jhu• 3 months ago

Similar discussion for CJK scripts

https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pix...

soperj2• 3 months ago

If the author sees this. I think the lower case t would benefit from a pixel above the cross, similar to how the lower case k goes up one more pixel. It looks a lot like the capital T with how it is now. It is very well done though. Thanks for sharing.

gpm• 3 months ago

I think I'd go with something like

     x
    xxx
     x
     xx

soperj2• 3 months ago

didn't even think about the stem on the bottom. Originally I was thinking just the cross

     x
    xxx
     x
     x

But I think you're right.

usefulcat• 3 months ago

Agree about lowercase t. I was surprised the lowercase l didn't look more like

kibwen2• 3 months ago

4x4: Not enough to draw "E", "M" or "W" properly.

However, 5x5 isn't enough to draw "e" properly if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase, so you need at least 6 vertical pixels. And then that isn't enough to draw any character with a descender properly, so you need at least 7 vertical pixels (technically you should have 8 in order to allow "g" and "y" to have a distinct horizontal descender while still sitting on the baseline, but this is probably an acceptable compromise). And remember that in practice this means you will still need at least 8x6 pixels to draw each character, to allow for a visible gap between letters below and beside them.

mulr00ney• 3 months ago

I think the `e` looks better in the 'real pixels' example they gave; I find my tends to 'fill in' the space of the top part of the letter, and I suspect in the context of a longer sentence it'd be pretty easy to parse.

(but yeah, it's not quite right, and is especially jarring in the nice, clean, blown up pixels in the top example)

kibwen2• 3 months ago

It definitely looks better in the second screenshot than the first, but you have to be very, very close to the screen in order to see individual pixels like that. And on low-res displays, which this sort of font might be necessary for, it's going to look somewhat different because low-res screens tend to be chosen for cheapness, and cheap screens tend to be monochrome, so none of that artistic fuzzy subpixel coloring.

benj1113• 3 months ago

Was it intended that we should fill in the word 'mind' ourselves, to prove your point???

JoshTriplett7• 3 months ago

if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase

I think that's the least of the properties I'd be willing to sacrifice to have a font that tiny.

bsza• 3 months ago

5x5 isn't enough to draw "e" properly if you also want lowercase letters to have less height than uppercase

It can be enough if you "cheat" and make use of the horizontal space. This is how I did it in my font:

   ##
  # #
  ##  #
   ###

z2• 3 months ago

The 3x2 is fascinating, it's the same resolution as braille, albeit rotated 90 degrees. I wonder if this could become a braille-like system that's both visually and finger-readable.

Note: there are repeat glyphs here like c and o, though the example actually uses a different c somehow. But perhaps repeats are ok given context.

0110101001• 3 months ago

In the 2x2 resolution (which can't support all of Braille, but does support the first 10 characters), A, B, C, E, and F are all the recognizable Braille shapes for those letters (though in offset positions).

At first, it seemed like an Easter egg, but it's probably just a natural happenstance of two people centuries apart deciding to represent the first ten letters of the alphabet in a 2x2 grid with a general idea to use fewer dots at the start than at the end.

damieng• 3 months ago

You can get nicer 5x5 fonts amd it was not that uncommon back in the day. 4 wide is not too bad if you make the center of M and W just two pixels inset from top or bottom respectively or borrow the spacing column.

Plenty of systems did it like CP/M on the Spectrum +3 and it looks pretty decent.

TruthSHIFT• 3 months ago

Don't forget Jason Kottke's Silkscreen font: https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/

ghssds• 3 months ago

You could do a bit better with a 4x5 font for every characters except M, W, m, and w which would be 5x5 but use the pixels normaly used to separate them from the next character, so every caracters still use the same width.

perarneng• 3 months ago

If you start from the bottom of the page directly and scroll up then the 5x5 looks even better.

calebm• 3 months ago

You could call it the "Minimum Viable Font"

rbanffy2• 3 months ago

One nice use for these tiny fonts is large text in terminals. Unicode now has 2x4 (from Kaypro), 2x3 (from Teletext, TRS-80), and 2x2 mosaic characters. Unicode also has 3x3 large text (from HP terminals) but font and terminal support is limited.

kevin_thibedeau2• 3 months ago

I assume you mean Braille is the 2x4 set. What range introduces 3x3 codepoints?

rbanffy2• 3 months ago

The 3x3 are the large text blocks - intended to use in 3x3 groups to form letters and numbers from the fragments in the range. There are 2x4 mosaics as well, separate from the Braille alphabet. These are symbols coming from legacy systems (such as the HP terminals and Kaypro CP/M machines).

akavel2• 3 months ago

See also u8g2 fonts: https://docs.rs/u8g2-fonts/latest/u8g2_fonts/fonts/index.htm... (available also in original C at: https://github.com/olikraus/u8g2/wiki/fntlistall)

octagons• 3 months ago

I developed a font with a similar resolution that was not nearly as legible for my Pi Zero with an e-ink screen many years ago. It allowed for similar tooling such as the flipper zero and esp32 marauder projects. I should fire that project up and implement this font…

Footprint0521• 3 months ago

Dude I was thinking exactly that, might have to mod my f0 momentum firmware

onlyrealcuzzo• 3 months ago

I love the design of your website!

Dwedit• 3 months ago

A 3x5 font does not sacrifice the M or W. H,M,W end up as similar looking characters, but the M has the center pixel one higher, and the W has the center pixel one lower.

thesuperevil• 3 months ago

tliltocatl• 3 months ago

At that point, just go Braille! Amazing work anyway.

ludocode• 3 months ago

The 5x5 is very nice, and the 3x5 isn't bad either. Unfortunately neither of them have all of ASCII. The size is also a bit misleading because you need to add spacing so really they need a 6x6 or 4x6 grid.

I'm quite fond of Spleen:

https://github.com/fcambus/spleen

It has a 5x8 font which has all of ASCII, but most glyphs are actually 4x8 and include horizontal spacing. I modified it to reduce the rest for a project I'm doing so all glyphs are 4x8. The result can be rendered on a 5x9 grid with a guaranteed line of horizontal and vertical spacing between all glyphs. It's very nice.

RachelF• 3 months ago

In the early 1980s there were actually word processors for the Apple 2 which had a 40 column display (7 pixel wide fonts default) that gave 60 columns using the a 5x5 font in graphics mode. It was a selling point.

The hardware solution was to buy an "80 column card" that gave 80 columns of proper text, if your monitor could handle it.

tomtomtom777• 3 months ago

At 3x5 it states:

The "M", "W" and "Q" suffer, but it's still got a distinct O and zero.

The Q is weird; I would think it makes more sense to draw it as a zero with the bottom right set.

dmitrygr• 3 months ago

I have used this one before, it uses one fewer pixels per char: (4x6 = 24 < 25 = 5x5)

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1656341/tom-thumb

mikestew• 3 months ago

"Images were displayed on an Apple 30" Cinema Display"

Yowsa. For those playing at home, that monitor is over 20 years old:

https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...

GolfPopper• 3 months ago

I didn't seen any mention of Tony Pai's quite good 3x3 font (only uppercase):

https://tonypai.itch.io/3x3-pixel-font

throwaway287391• 3 months ago

A bunch of these appear to be 9x9-ish? (B, P, Q, R, Z, 0, most of the non-alphanumerics...)

ESMP• 3 months ago

Wouldn't something like this be ideal for devices like Xteink X4?

sbarre• 3 months ago

The resolution on my X4 is pretty decent, and regular fonts look just fine.

I don't think there's a need for tiny fonts on an e-reader, even one with a small screen. IMO when you're reading a book I think you want to prioritize readability, not characters-per-page.

jh00ker• 3 months ago

I always loved the 5x6 Pixel font in this classic 90s PC game: https://covertaction.fandom.com/wiki/Cryptography_(Mini-Game...

The extra 1 pixel of height for the text in green, in particular, allowed for some cool "italic" styling, especially for letters like E, D, J, U, V

pugworthy• 3 months ago

CGA era developers are like, "Yea been there done that..."

reaperducer• 3 months ago

And Commodore 64 people.

VIP Term, and others, had 3x7 fonts on 4x8 grids to connect to 80-column mainframes.

mjaniczek• 3 months ago

Oh cool, I have to try these fonts on my amber CRT getting commands from an Elm webapp ([demo](https://youtu.be/M9Q5tFPtGaA?t=121), [code](https://github.com/Janiczek/crt-esp32-elm/tree/main/vdom/)) - there's not a lot of real estate in a 400x240 NTSC resolution. But the scanlined rendering has so much charm!

EDIT: realized a better demo for this discussion would be the photos I took of all the tiny bitmap fonts I had converted to the C array style at the time. Thread has more but here are my favorites: https://bsky.app/profile/janiczek.cz/post/3mh25atboz224

namanvyas• 3 months ago

I've used 3x5 fonts on a couple of embedded projects and honestly the biggest pain isn't the font itself, its getting the spacing right.

huydotnet• 3 months ago

I'm gonna use this article to explain to my peers about LLM quantization!

Theodores• 3 months ago

Many decades ago it was anti aliasing with MS clear type that made small text possible. Yet, before that, for regular TV, this had been worked out, so lots of text could be shown on things like business TV, in glorious analogue PAL or never twice same colour for Americans.

Small text is an interesting problem, but we have moved on from pixels as useful units.

enriquto2• 3 months ago

This is cool, but my problem is the opposite: I have a modern laptop screen with tiny pixels. What I need is then a huge bitmap font... does anybody have any?

frankling_• 3 months ago

Here are a few made by upscaling and then manually cleaning up classic fonts: https://github.com/B2HDPI/B2HDPI

The glyph coverage is enough for most programming languages; missing glyphs just fall back to a pixelized look.

Lode 1.5x works really well at 110 ppi displays, which seems to be the uncanny valley for antialiasing.

sandos• 3 months ago

Why a bitmap font if you have tiny pixels? Just use a sharp font like Iosevka or similar.

enriquto2• 3 months ago

i want all occurrences of the same glyph to be identical. This is essentially impossible to obtain with blurry "antialiased" fonts.

AvAn12• 3 months ago

Like dot matrix printer fonts

patrakov• 3 months ago

Using multi-level grayscale instead of just two pixel states, on and off, can produce readable text at even smaller font sizes. The catch is that I have to say "text", not "letters", i.e., rely on humans inferring the too-blurry letters from their context. And I do not even need a specially designed font for that.

Example: https://imgur.com/a/text-80-characters-per-line-240-pixels-w...

That's 3 horizontal pixels per character on average, including inter-character spacing.

rahimnathwani• 3 months ago

6×3 is also good (fits on a 7×4 grid).

https://archive.org/details/zx_Tasword_2_Tutor_1983_Tasman_S...

russellbeattie• 3 months ago

I think on my 6.8" WQHD+ 3200 x 1440 phone screen (70.5mm width), an actual 5x5 pixel square might be the size of a period → .

Doing the math, 70.5mm / 1440px = 0.05mm per pixel, x5 = 0.25mm wide. Just a guess though, I'm not exactly sure how big a period is without a microscope.

chuckadams• 3 months ago

Fonts like this are also great for huge screens like LED signage. Big pixels and very low resolution, so logically a tiny screen.

analog83742• 3 months ago

i really like your website design

analog83742• 3 months ago

bunk! he left out 1x1

hank808• 3 months ago

Very cool for anyone with flawless eyesight!

anthk• 3 months ago

I remember a weird font with a special alphabet made of dots or something like that. Not Braille, it was for fast reading or such.

SyzygyRhythm• 3 months ago

The ship computers in the old game Privateer (and probably Wing Commander) had a pretty nice pixel font. Most of the characters were 3x4, but with a few niceties: descenders (j, p, q) could go below the normal outline, and wide glyphs like m/n/w were more than 3 pixels wide. Overall, pretty readable for uppercase/lowercase/numerics, and included a few "futuristic" touches.

davebren• 3 months ago

Somewhat relevant, I learned a mapping of individual characters to colors with a chrome extension I made, so the text size doesn't really matter since words are just sequences of colors. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rainbow-text/jhkgcm...

JKCalhoun• 3 months ago

Gonna have to ask for a proportional version of this font.

I mean, look at the capital "I".

;-)

dnnddidiej• 3 months ago

Makes me wonder. Geeks are happy to learn a new keyboard layout. What about a new alphabet that can give higher on screen density of data. Now 3x3 isn't necessary because we have high res monitors. We need 26 distinguishable shapes for a-z.

In theory (focusing on non colourblind english speakers) there could be say 8 distinct colours and 8 shapes giving 64 chars.

mchl-mumo• 3 months ago

This would be insanely cool. Building characters for the digital era not for handwriting.

DHowett• 3 months ago

There was a project a while back that attempted to do this, named “Dotsies”.

https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/dotsies.htm (original site https://www.dotsies.org, which has a casual introduction text that slowly transitions into dots; however, it was unavailable at the time of writing.)

fluoridation• 3 months ago

Doesn't braille already cover this need?

pjc50• 3 months ago

As various Japanese developers have discovered, you can fit quite a lot of distinct characters into 8x8 if your audience is familiar with them: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/36423/is-this-8...

However I don't think even native developers with full Unicode language support tend to use Japanese/Chinese characters in variable names or keywords. There is the occasional hybrid registry key such as "令和_令_Reiwa_R" (which will allow the temporary replacement of the name of the Emperor in Windows dates when the current one dies).

archargelod2• 3 months ago

Most tiny fonts are actually terrible to read at a glance especially when they're rendered at 1:1 scale. I've had a need couple years ago for a very tiny and compact font for a game mod I was making. And after trying a lot of 33, 35, even 2*5 fonts - they were all terrible to read.

In the end, I found "Gremlin-3x6" font[0] made by the guy named zephram. It's 1 pixel taller, but still a very compact when laid out horizontally. But, most importantly, all standard latin characters are pretty distinct from each other and it remains readable without zooming in too much.

Unfortunately, since then, zephram deleted his fontstruct account and all of his fonts. I have a copy of this font in my mod repo[1] along with a CC0 license and you can see the actual rendering of the font in the project screenshots[2].

[0] https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1488093

[1] https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/src/b...

[2] https://codeberg.org/janAkali/isaac-extended-icons-mod/media...

ciupicri• 3 months ago

The server returned a "404 Not Found".

for [0]

archargelod2• 3 months ago

As I explained in the last paragraph of my comment, it was deleted for some reason. I also couldn't find any archives of that page. I only added the link to show where I got the font from, in case people will miss the link inside the license file.

drdeca• 3 months ago

simplifier has a 4x4 version : https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4

shumatsumonobu• 3 months ago

This is gorgeous. 5x5 is a wild constraint — every pixel has to earn its place. The fact that it's still readable at that size says a lot about the craft.

thwarted• 3 months ago

This reminded me of work to get the C64 to do 80 columns in software, using a 3x7 pixel grid (with one row and column used for spacing), some of which were part of commercial products.

https://www.pagetable.com/?p=901

Creating a 4×8 character set that is both readable and looks good is not easy. There has to be a one-pixel gap between characters, so characters can effectively only be 3 pixels wide. For characters like “M” and “N”, this is a challenge.

kruador• 3 months ago

I remember using Tasword Two for the ZX Spectrum. Even with a 3x7 font (4x8 grid) it only achieves 64 characters per line. Apparently in Tasword III the authors implemented 128 characters per line - by scrolling.

Competitors could apparently show 80 characters per line, but only by switching to a horribly unreadable 2x7 font. "I found the tiny 80 column characters tiring to read but the mode is useful if you want to see what the finished output will be like." - https://www.crashonline.org.uk/31/words.htm . I can't find a screenshot.

biomech• 3 months ago

In the 3 x 2 example, the text is supposed to say “can probably” but I think the glyph for b was used instead, so it reads “you ban probably”.

JCTheDenthog• 3 months ago

Narrower 4x5 and 3x5 dimensions are possible, but would require sacrificing the M, dotted zero, and reduce U/V/Y distinctiveness.

I think 3x5 works well enough:

https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html

LandenLove• 3 months ago

Now do 1x2 using Morse code.

parlortricks• 3 months ago

This is great, i use a 3x3 font i drew up for lowres games, though there are many example that look mostly the same since it is such a small space.

userbinator• 3 months ago

Looking at the screenshots shows why there's a reason 5x7 is the "standard" for tiny legible fonts that cover all of ASCII, e.g. as found in character LCD displays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD44780_(integrated_circuit)

sponno• 3 months ago

And for 1x1 screens ..........................

Pxtl• 3 months ago

The 3x5 size is pretty common in wplace, it's a good compromise.

larsbrinkhoff• 3 months ago

The LINC minicomputer operating system LAP6 came with a 4x5 font, but it didn't have lower case.

thuridas• 3 months ago

Some non-ascii characters will be hard on 5x5 like ñ o É

happyweasel• 3 months ago

Used this kind of font for output on the 320x200 screen all of the time in the late 80s while coding 68k asm on the Atari St

konschubert• 3 months ago

When I was building the layouts for my e-paper calendars , I needed pixel fonts due to the lack of grayscale on the display. It was surprisingly hard to find them - especially with customers asking for Cyrillic characters.

rustyhancock• 3 months ago

I love this but the licensing is ashame.

Does the NC in CC4.0 BY-NC-SA mean I couldn't for example sell a device using this?

What fustrates me about this is that it's such a narrow workspace, if I decided I wanted a 5x5 font there are very few ways to do that.

I get that this probably isn't copyrightable but at least make your license sensible.

orac81• 3 months ago

The site looks interesting, but it has a pop up called "navigation" that cannot be closed, and sits over the page rendering parts unreadable.

keepamovin• 3 months ago

Idk why maybe my font-size on this screen is too small but when I glanced at that title I read: "Sex Pistols font for tiny screens" haha

voidUpdate• 3 months ago

This reminds me of the book Arcade Game Typography (https://www.counter-print.co.uk/products/arcade-game-typogra...), which looks at the history of a lot of arcade game fonts, sorted by category, and often has a full sprite sheet of the letters. I've been meaning to make my own digitised copy of all of the fonts for a while

gurkwart• 3 months ago

Nice overview.

At this size, there's no way to have a distinct upper and lowercase [...]

3x4 is feasible. I've designed the MiniGent font [1], including greek letters, numerals, punctuation, math, currency, and emojis. Written a whole LaTeX typesetter [2] around it. While not perfect, I'm amazed by how far you can take it arranging just a few pixels.

[1] https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/minigent/ [2] https://gurki.github.io/pixeltex/pixeltex/

bigell• 3 months ago

This is awesome!

I could almost fit an entire 80x40 terminal on my watch face!

inflam52• 3 months ago

Thumby has a 3x5 but I do like this 5x5 better

https://thumby.us/API/Text-and-Font/

division_by_0• 3 months ago

I created a very similar 5x5 font in 2025, which I currently just use to render the word "CYBERNETIC" [0]. Only the "R" and "Y" characters are different from the article's font (no wonder, given the limited degrees of freedom). What I did in addition is add a discrete radial gradient with increasing brightness towards the center, which is of course very playful, but looks cool for a logo font and makes the individual pixels visible.

[0] https://cybernetic.dev

phkahler• 3 months ago

This is horrible. The upper case is almost pixel-identical to the built in font on the Interact Home Computer - the one I learned on in 1980. This font adds lower-case which is impressive but still sucks. I know from years of using a 5x5 font that it's terrible in practice.

Side note: the Interact triple scanned every row of pixels, so the vertical resolution was only 77 (ish, it was overscanned) pixels. Had they used a bit more RAM for the display they could have easily just double-scanned each row and increased to a 5x7 font. That would have been a huge improvement.

BTW still need to find a museum that wants an Interact.

michaelcampbell• 3 months ago

I have an irrational love for this.

superxpro12• 3 months ago

Where was this when i was working on my 128x64 oled screen????

I ended up finding a bitmap and modifying it for my own needs. That was fun.

andrewmu• 3 months ago

I haven't got round to publicising it yet, but I made a web application for designing small pixel fonts: https://microfonts.com/

The smallest legible one I've come up with is 4x6 (with inter-character spacing).

nomdep• 3 months ago

This brings me back to the custom HP-48G applications with UIs made pixel-by-pixel. 3x5 letters where everywhere, but 3x4 and even 3x3 were used and were still legible:

- https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/ship.png

- https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/games/board/sshots/othellof.png

dorfsmay• 3 months ago

I was surprised they used a square (5x5) as fonts are usually taller than wide.

But they mention:

Narrower 4x5 and 3x5 dimensions are possible, but would require sacrificing the M, dotted zero, and reduce U/V/Y distinctiveness

Note whole the characters are 5x5, the character box is 6x6 to provide for Spain between characters, from what I can tell from https://maurycyz.com/projects/mcufont/real.jpg

caspar• 3 months ago

2x2 pixel font is probably impossible[1], but with a few more pixels of width someone made a surprisingly readable 2-pixel-high font: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1myh81x/2px_high_...

Released by the author at https://joefatula.com/twoslice.html

[1]: unless you use multiple glyphs for a char. Or maybe it'd be possible to interpret if the glyph-to-char mapping pattern was very carefully thought out..

markusMB• 3 months ago

Turns out, just by adding a 1 pixel border, you can (visually) turn the characters into a Aruco AR code dictionary :-) The dictionary created from the whole font does have uniqueness collisions – it depends on your use case if that is problematic. But you can create a font of AR codes that can be read by machine as well as human: https://codeberg.org/markusBM/ARuChars#readme

lilinzheng2• 3 months ago

你好

lilinzheng2• 3 months ago

嗨喽

5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens

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