Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

this is actually 4×4 if you're counting pixels needed on the output device instead of rom space needed; another, more comprehensive font of the same size is https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4

the same problem happens with the public-domain 'tom thumb' font pushfoo linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38800409. it is actually 4×6 (24 output pixels) but claims to be 3×5

it can be accessed despite tls problems at http://web.archive.org/web/20230828193815/https://robey.lag.... but says 'Please do not post this article to Hacker News.'

my own 4×6 font is demonstrated at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dofonts-1k.html, where it fits into a 1024-byte web page along with all the logic needed to render ascii text with it; but the proportional font i used in http://canonical.org/~kragen/bible-columns (rendered with http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/propfontr...) is at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/6-pixel-1... and is slightly smaller; it averages 21.5 pixels per character. this is more than anders de flon's so-called 3×3, which is 16 pixels per character, but it supports the full character set, if you think ascii is the full character set anyway. so does simplifier's 4×4 font

i think you could do better by using grayscale for antialiasing, and as rafabulsing pointed out, matt sarnoff's millitext http://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ uses subpixel antialiasing to get very readable text at 1⅔×5 pixels

Why is it "actually 4x4"? Are you counting the space between the letters?

I think 3x3 is just as reasonable to describe this, because every character is 3x3 pixels, and this spacing is not really a font property. e.g. the mentioned album cover is an example (which would be "3.1x3.1"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheath_(album)

because, if you want to use this font to represent 1000 characters of text, you need 16000 pixels, not 9000

on the album cover it looks like the characters are about 1000×1000 pixels each, which is why it's possible to put an extra small space between them

The Atari ST came with a 6x6 font, including spacing: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/876150/atari_st_6 - 5x5 means no compromises required for upper case letters, which are all readable, and punctuation is intelligible. The liberties taken with lower case are probably acceptable.

(Been years since I saw this font in situ so I'm not sure what it'd look like if you have two adjacent rows of text! Probably mostly OK, but I bet some letters would meet. The ST's OS used this font for icon labels, so there was always a gap.)

4x4 ASCII font was previously discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33127419

hey, thanks! i forgot about this thread

quoting myself from an earlier thread:

just to clarify, the 4×6 font is (at least mostly, maybe entirely, I don't remember) the work of Janne V. Kujala in 4x6.bdf, as distributed by Markus Kuhn and now included in XFree86 (and presumably X.org, unless they've dropped BDFs entirely). The XLFD is -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--6-60-75-75-c-40-iso10646-1, so you can try it by running

    xterm -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--6-60-75-75-c-40-iso10646-1

My proportional n×6 and 3×n fonts are derived from it.

here i'm talking about my 4×6 font, not tom thumb

>this is actually 4×4 if you're counting pixels needed on the output device instead of rom space needed

What do you mean by this? Each character requires only a 3x3 grid of pixels to draw.

in the text modes of old computers, there isn't anything to separate one character from those next to it, so that space has to be in the character itself.

not just text modes or old computers but literally anything made of pixels

The font can just encode how many pixels for kerning that it wants. There is no reason for it to be part of the character itself

it was pretty common for font roms to have implicit spacing pixels in between characters in order to save on rom space

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