[HN Gopher] 4x4 ASCII Font ___________________________________________________________________ 4x4 ASCII Font Author : thunderbong Score : 21 points Date : 2022-10-07 22:02 UTC (58 minutes ago) (HTM) web link (simplifier.neocities.org) (TXT) w3m dump (simplifier.neocities.org) | omoikane wrote: | I like this, it's like code golf but for fonts. It's cool that it | can be done but not something I would use regularly. | | I think the end game would be a 3x2 font that is basically | Braille. | simonjgreen wrote: | Impressive how readable that still is, and how good our brains | are at filling blanks, but you wouldn't want to rely on it. I'm | not sure I can parse || as an x reliably for example. The | uppercase alone works, lowercase is pretty challenging. | xyproto wrote: | On the upside, x isn't used that much. | seanalltogether wrote: | Isn't everything on the page in a 3x3 grid? | mccorrinall wrote: | Nope. Take a look at lowercase j. | scrollaway wrote: | It sounds to me like it should be possible to use a 4x4 grid | but add a single bit to express whether the letter is shifted | up or down by 1px. Then your characters are 4x4 but occupying | a 5x4 space. | jamal-kumar wrote: | As much as I love bitmapped fonts I just don't know if there's | one that supports unicode yet and since I work internationally | it's kind of a sticking point in wanting to go all the way to | using them in my terminal or whatever, even though it looks | incredibly crisp. Is there anything like that out there which at | least covers characters in latin alphabets with diacritics and | cyrillic? | crispyalmond wrote: | Unifont[0] covers a lot of Unicode codepoints. | | [0] https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont/ | wongarsu wrote: | The uppercase version is kind of ok. I'm not a fan of the 9 or | the D, but I think you'd quickly get used to that. What's even | more impressive is that if you consider just uppercase and | numbers, it's a 3x3 font. | snvzz wrote: | I feel strongly that it should be possible to do this better. | | 4x4 box, yet most characters seem to be confined to 3x3 box. This | can't be right. | xani_ wrote: | So 4x4 is too small for readable font | akvadrako wrote: | Uppercase is readable. | numlock86 wrote: | Only in context. Letters like B, D, E, G, O, M and W are just | literal blobs of pixels without any indication of what the | actual letter might be. You can only tell C and E apart if | you know what the other one looks like. Even worse for lower | case. See x for example. | hyakosm wrote: | THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LASY OOO TED4PLTO7O TIMESY | trasz wrote: | I wonder if - and if so, how much - its readability improves | with readers' experience with it. | vesinisa wrote: | Yes indeed. I am sure the author learned to read texts with | this font quite fluently while working on it, and you'd learn | too with little practice. | capableweb wrote: | Seems 5x5 is the limit. 5x5 is perfectly readable to me, while | this 4x4 one is not always very clear. | | Example of 5x5: | https://www.dafont.com/5x5.font?text=Small+fonts+have+always... | 1-6 wrote: | Looks like the 5x5 example doesn't even bother recreating | lowercase letters. | kelseyfrog wrote: | This makes it completely unusable. | zugi wrote: | Nice but keep in mind that 5x5 font just punted on lower case | letters entirely. So there are no descenders and they use the | full 5x5 for upper case. | | The 4x4 font has lower case, so it reserves the bottom row | for descenders gjpqy. Its upper case letters don't use the | descenders row so they're really 3x3, which is barely | readable. It's actually interesting that the all caps 3x3 is | almost readable! | | For comparison it would be interesting to see a 4x4 all caps | font, or a 5x5 with lower case. | _def wrote: | I remember these from various forum signature prestige | graphics lol | alrlroipsp wrote: | Nope. | trasz wrote: | This is an interesting idea, but given how inexpensive the high | resolution small SPI-connected LCD displays already are, this | might not be a very useful solution. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-07 23:00 UTC)