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.
5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
31–40 of 168 posts
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#32...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!
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.
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
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,…
What does the existence of a color photograph of my grandmother as an old woman have to do with my desire to colorize a grayscale photo of her as a child? Or colorize the photos of her wedding?
It's a very strange argument to make: there exist some photos therefore other photos may not be colorized!
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#34See 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)
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#35I 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…
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#36...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!
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.
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.
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#37I love the design of your website!
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#38A 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.
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#39Too 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).
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...)
Re: 5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens
#40Gg