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Comment by tomsmeding | Hacker News Reader

Makes me think of a related font, dotsies [1]. It's not necessarily meant to be displayed at 1px wide, but it would be possible. The intro/tutorial on that page is a pleasure to go through, in a mind-bending way.

[1]: http://dotsies.org

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I was experimenting with same idea. It is basically Baudot code used as a font. Problem I had with this is that I couldnt reliably read it.

But I think color alphabet may have some merit: http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/6color.php

Has anyone learned to actually read that . If so, how hard is it ? :)

I picked it up briefly to familiarity. You can learn to read it very quickly ("read" here meaning you no longer need to refer to the key so you can increase your reading speed just by reading more). If you're going to learn it consider learning dotsies v3[0] instead. All vowels plus y, and only the vowels, touch both edges which fixes the main issue, that you can't tell abcde apart.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602163 the bottom link is v3.

Do you use the v3 in a practical application? e.g. browsing or programming?

Since no one has presented a version of the dotsies bookmarklet, which is actually necessary to use them in practice, I'll go and make one with the proper mapping for v3.

If there is one already, let me know.

Actually, looks like all the permutations in the bookmarklet only allow you to use glyphs in Dotsies.tff, and there are some possible glyphs missing. I'll have to edit the font file.

I could read it at first glance, I didn’t need any training. Maybe it’s different between individuals

The initial words use a font for each letter within the letter. Normal dotsies are the bottom rows.

I just now spent about an hour reading the homepage's article that incrementally introduces dotsies characters. It went surprisingly smoothly and effortlessly, though my reading speed was fairly slow compared to normal.

I'd say it's a fun exercise for anyone at all interested.

It might even be possible to render at 1/3rd pixels wide, if you take advantage of RGB sub-pixels on an LCD. Sounds like a fun thing to try.

The OP did precisely this!

The OP did not pack three letters into each column of pixels.

Not precisely. They took advantage of sub-pixels but still needed more (sub-)pixel width per letter.

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