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world smallest font.. Tasword?

orangeorange
edited November 2010 in Sinclair Miscellaneous
I think Tasword uses font like this:
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/1438228/The-Worlds-Smallest-Legible-Font
Post edited by orange on

Comments

  • HerculesHercules
    edited November 2010
    Is their a dowload link as a TTF (true type font) ?
  • fogfog
    edited November 2010
    I "think" it's either turbo charge or vendetta by system 3 on 64 has a ultra small font.. e.g. the "b" has no middle bit etc.

    not sure if the intro is on the spectrum version..

    I guess it's what, 3 pixels wide by 4-6 ?
  • Paul van der LaanPaul van der Laan
    edited November 2010
    Two things:

    1. If you zoom in on the picture you'll notice it's a greyscale font so it can never work on a Spectrum.

    2. Legibility can't be defined in exact values and therefore the claim "the world's smallest legible font" is nonsense. To me that sample is incredibly illegible and I don't see what the fuzz is about. It does get more legible the more I zoom in but that defies its purpose then...
  • joefishjoefish
    edited November 2010
    As Paul says, the claim is bollocks. It's just a bit of runaway internet gossip. The font is heavily anti-aliased, though I'd argue it doesn't need to be. It's also grey-scale, so it's not even using the sub-pixel rendering techniques you can take advantage of on LCD displays.

    I've seen plenty of old games and / or loading screens that used a tiny monochrome pixel font with no more than 3x5 pixel characters in 4x6 spacing. I've designed a couple myself while working on the LEGO Mindstorms NXT before its official public release, as that only has a 100x64 screen. You can do quite a bit even in 3x4, and pass some text off as 3x3.

    What matters is context - in a block of text you can approximately guess the letters you don't get straight away by the surrounding word or sentence. If you were to present the characters in random order like an eye chart, you wouldn't stand a chance of making them all out.
    Joefish
    - IONIAN-GAMES.com -
  • orangeorange
    edited November 2010
    but the whole point here is that it *does* use subpixel rendering..
    And I'm not sure that .jpg or .png they provided is what it actually looks like on mobile devices. I mean, bitmap picture cannot control subpixels, right?

    there is one particularly interesting comment that says AppleII used some special techniques,:
    "Of course, the early computers like Apple ][ pushed the capabilities of NTSC color TV sets to the point that white pixels would pulsate in blue or yellow due to the chroma subcarrier phase shift (look that up), so they were sorta working at the subpixel level."
  • joefishjoefish
    edited November 2010
    Sorry, I stand corrected, there's some very faint bits of red and cyan in that image.
    Joefish
    - IONIAN-GAMES.com -
  • Paul van der LaanPaul van der Laan
    edited November 2010
    orange wrote: »
    but the whole point here is that it *does* use subpixel rendering..
    Only faintly I'd say when I zoom in. Most of the effect is still achieved through grayscale aliasing - a technique which was already fully explored for CRT displays decades ago.
    orange wrote: »
    And I'm not sure that .jpg or .png they provided is what it actually looks like on mobile devices. I mean, bitmap picture cannot control subpixels, right
    What is rendered on screen is always an image, even type that is using subpixel-aliasing. You can read more about the whole subject here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering.
  • Paddy ColemanPaddy Coleman
    edited November 2010
    Hi Folks,

    The MicroPrint utility provides a maximum of 85 characters per line on a Spectrum. It is readable although 64 is better.

    Paddy
  • kpuchatekkpuchatek
    edited November 2010
    BTW. Is any ready font pack available from Tasword or Gens ?
    If colors are not used, this is quite nice option.
    Any good Win utility to design Spectrum fonts and save them as bin file ?
  • Jonathan HarstonJonathan Harston
    edited November 2010
    orange wrote: »
    I think Tasword uses font like this:
    http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/11/16/1438228/The-Worlds-Smallest-Legible-Font
    Tasword uses a 3x6 font, like this which I created by selecting soft MODE 8 on the BBC.
    kpuchatek wrote: »
    BTW. Is any ready font pack available from Tasword or Gens ?
    If colors are not used, this is quite nice option.
    Any good Win utility to design Spectrum fonts and save them as bin file ?
    DefChar runs on Windows, I'll upload a Window executable in a few minutes. (Edit: now uploaded)
    Crisis wrote: »
    It looks like 3x5 overall with a 1 pixel side taking a max off 4x6.
    No underscore characters already saves 1 pixel in hight, typical 'g' it has.
    A real ZX downloadable would be nice..
    ThinChars is CHR$32-CHR$127 one character per 8x8 matrix
    ThinSet is CHR$32-CHR$127 two characters per 8x8 matrix
    ThnChrs is CHR$32-CHR$255 one character per 8x8 matrix
  • joefishjoefish
    edited November 2010
    Looks like 3x7 in a 4x8 space to me (look at the '2'). Though the lower-case tails at the top are using the full 3x8 height and touching the capitals on the line below.
    The capitals will shrink to 3x5 in a 4x6 space without much loss in readability, but lower case wouldn't look quite so good.
    Joefish
    - IONIAN-GAMES.com -
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