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5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens

https://maurycyz.com/projects/mcufont/
113•zdw•3d ago

Comments

lostmsu•3d 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•1h ago
Perhaps they should've used something similar to the 9. However then it wouldn't really look like a lower-case g.
ramses0•1h 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•1h ago
See also Picket Right, 2 pixels wide (7 high) and still readable: https://stormgold.itch.io/picket-right-font
dfox•1h 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_net•1h 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).

JoshTriplett•59m 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.

compiler-guy•59m 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.

sophacles•48m 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_net•17m 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.

joefourier•46m 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_net•21m 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.

zimpenfish•14m ago
> If you know a person who is 70 years old, they were 20 in 1975

Bloody hell, warn people before you post things like that.

JoshTriplett•1h ago
These look great.

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

DonThomasitos•1h ago
Incomplete blog post! Where was the comparison vs. a 1x1 pixel font?
FelipeCortez•1h ago
1x5 can also work if you take advantage of subpixel rendering https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/
rossant•39m ago
Whoa, amazing!
iamjackg•57m 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
bmurray7jhu•56m ago
Similar discussion for CJK scripts

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

soperj•52m 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•19m ago
I think I'd go with something like

     x
    xxx
     x
     xx
kibwen•49m 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•41m 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)

z2•49m 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.

damieng•48m 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•47m ago
Don't forget Jason Kottke's Silkscreen font: https://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/
ghssds•30m 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•26m ago
If you start from the bottom of the page directly and scroll up then the 5x5 looks even better.
calebm•7m ago
You could call it the "Minimum Viable Font"

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https://maurycyz.com/projects/mcufont/
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