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Posted by JdeBP 8 hours ago

Two Slice, a font that's only 2px tall(joefatula.com)
182 points | 50 comments
JdeBP 8 hours ago|
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

omoikane 4 hours ago||
I wonder if there are really tiny fonts that make use of color. For example, this 2-pixel wide Picket Right font could theoretically be even thinner if we were to use sub-pixel features.

At least, I think the 2-pixel high Two Slice font can be more legible with some anti-aliasing.

sedatk 4 hours ago|||
Yes. https://advent.blinry.org/2018/17
Cthulhu_ 7 minutes ago||
Direct link: https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/
thfuran 22 minutes ago|||
Don’t stop at colors. Just add a ligature for every string and support for animations, and you have yourself a font that can render any alphanumeric string in a single pixel. I’ll need to brush up on Morse code though.
eichin 3 hours ago|||
and https://stormgold.itch.io/two-slice - are these the same authors or what?
eichin 1 hour ago||
Ah! the reddit user description hoverbox for u/trampolinebears says "Fonts: stormgold.itch.io" so that connects the dots.
iguessthislldo 5 hours ago|||
That one is relatively easier to read, I guess because it looks like normal font that was cut into strips.
typpilol 4 hours ago||
Ya literally I could make out 85% quickly.

The linked one is unreadable at all to me lol

malnourish 6 hours ago|||
Thanks for sharing this. I enjoy seeing these cool subcultures; they evoke the hacker ethos.
JohnDeHope 5 hours ago|||
I’m not a hacker but I really appreciate their ethos. It’s like punk. I’m not punk either. But I will defend it all with my dying breathe.
JdeBP 2 hours ago|||
There's some quilting at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236312 .
hdjrudni 5 hours ago||
> such as small LED displays

The highest DPI screen is 127,000 PPI. You could fit over 14,000 lines of 8x8 text in a single inch tall screen.

For reference, a decent monitor is 140 PPI.

I'm pretty sure we don't need to go below 8x8 if physical size is the issue.

crq-yml 4 hours ago|||
Pad grid controllers like the Novation Launchpad, and its indie, open-source counterpart, Mystrix Pro, have an 8x8 grid. At first this style of controller didn't use any lights, but as the manufacturing and features progressed, they went towards one RGB LED per pad. So, of course, you end up doing some text and graphics on the resulting grid. Mystrix uses a scrolling marquee which isn't ideal, but does get the job done.

And yeah, you could throw on more hardware to have a display nearby and use that for text. That is not the problem being solved though.

bongodongobob 3 hours ago|||
No, small LED displays with like 25 ppi. Think arduino/embedded.
kstrauser 4 hours ago||
I'm blown away. I'd have sworn that wasn't possible. It's brilliant. Bravo.
imcritic 4 hours ago|
[flagged]
umanwizard 1 hour ago|||
Do you think anyone is suggesting this should actually be used for a practical purpose?
sniffers 4 hours ago|||
Idiotic seems strong. It's an art piece, is it simply not to your taste in art?
EGreg 3 hours ago||
Exactly. My taste in art skews idiotic, so what! :)
jl6 1 hour ago||
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.

addaon 5 hours ago||
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.
PenguinRevolver 5 hours ago||
Try reading "HiGh sky buys The lies" in the font. Pretty difficult to make out what it says...
jibcage 59 minutes ago||
I think most of what makes this font readable is the user using context to sort of guess at what the word could be.

If you start writing things that aren’t sentences normal people would use (or especially if you start mixing case) it doesn’t hold up. Still interesting for a “normal” use case though.

jasonjmcghee 5 hours ago||
I'm more concerned about V X Y all being identical.

How will I know if it's waxy or wavy?

throwaway808081 5 hours ago||
Like all of language: context.

Why would hair be like 80s synthpop, or potatoes be in any way related to a by-product of honey?

xboxnolifes 41 minutes ago||
Hair can be either waxy or wavy or both.
Dwedit 2 hours ago||
Meanwhile, 3x5 fonts are actually usable.
rtrgrd 2 hours ago||
Very cool - note that lowercase b, l and h are the same
Eric_WVGG 4 hours ago||
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)

sugarkjube 1 hour ago|
101010 - I'm guessing you know, and want to find out how long it takes for someone to notice and respond.
hidroto 1 hour ago||
little endian vs big endian.
Jowsey 4 hours ago||
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?
wingmanjd 2 hours ago||
I wish I had this back capability when I used to program my TI graphing calculators back in highschool!
shakna 1 hour ago|
> 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.

jader201 1 hour ago|
Yeah, a lot of words/letters made sense, but I definitely had to use some deduction to read it.

Interesting, and given the limitation, it’s quite impressive.

But I think “probably” is optimistic. I’d say “possibly” is more realistic.

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