If you're interested in other tiny fonts:
- PICO-8's 3x5 font with support for programming characters: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php?page=faq
- Ken Perlin has an RGB stripe subpixel font. Unfortunately, the original page uses Java so I can't access it, but https://www.fastcompany.com/1662778/the-worlds-smallest-legi... has more info.
- Dotsies if you're willing to try very strange encodings: https://dotsies.org/
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127419 has more examples.
A favorite of mine is the MonteCarlo Programmer Font [0]. I used it as my terminal font for a couple years.
[0] https://www.bok.net/MonteCarlo/
It looks like it's been iterated on quite a few times. Here's an active descendant project, for anyone that might be interested: https://github.com/sunaku/tamzen-font
I didn't know about this, thanks for sharing!
obviously 8x8 is comparably enormous but https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/ has a great collection of fonts
Theres also the wonderful "Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type" by Toshi Omigari which has pages and pages of fonts used in arcade games, sorted by style, most of which are 8x8
Also; if you really, really want the old-skool feel of the Trident 8900 SVGA card you had in your early 90s PC-compatible, or your Toshiba laptop from the same period:
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/
3x4 = 12 bits
52 upper/lower case letters + 10 numerals ≈ 64 = 6 bits
It's kind of amazing that the overhead is only a factor of 2 to literally read BINARY data with my eyes.
And that a 1bpp uncompressed image of a piece of text can be only 50% larger in file size than its .txt file and be readable.
Readability is in your own eyes.
What it is readable for you, is not for me.
Just map lower case to uppercase and replace any non alpha-num to a black square. This font is not for general use but just to squeeze text messages on tiny displays.
TBH, I see all this pretty useless. While still interesting enough.
Of related interest, the smallest grid needed for Simplified Chinese is 8x8:
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/lowest-pix...
Mouse TTF
I'm glad you linked to one with subpixel rendering.
Considering that when we view text on a modern display we're almost always seeing anti-aliased grayscale pixels with subpixel rendering, it doesn't make sense to me that you'd design a font that doesn't take advantage of that.
Why not even grayscale? Surely a few of the letters could be improved by using a pixel other than pure black or pure white?
I believe mine, while very incomplete, given some practice, is the most readable of the lot.
http://synesthesia.go-here.nl