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Comment by messe | Hacker News Reader

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messe·

OpenBSD's default console font Spleen has a 5x8 version which, which is fairly legible while still looking nice:

https://github.com/fcambus/spleen

Any smaller than that and you're getting into ugly territory.

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The smallest size at which English capital and lowercase letters are differentiable is 3x5, so 5x8 is pretty close to that minimum possible size. Any smaller and some letters become ambiguous or lose too much information to be unique (e.g., B vs 8). I haven’t checked to see if 3x5 can include symbols though, only the letters and numbers.

Oh, it's definitely possible to go lower than 5x8 and include symbols, but the issue is aesthetics. A lot of your lowercase letters are going to look taller than they usually would, which can be a distraction when reading.

If you don't care about appearances and just whether or not every character is distinct enough to be understood, then I think 4x6 is probably the limit, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Here is a 4x4 font: https://simplifier.neocities.org/4x4.html .

BESM-6 used to show CPU registers content with lights ( http://www.mailcom.com/besm6/ ); with this font, each 48-bit register could show 3 letters.

Look, I'm not going to deny its legibility, but I (and this is my opinion only) don't like it's appearance. It's pretty impressive considering the constraints though. This is what I meant by ugly territory in my original comment.

I think the 4x4 is legible only when you are already used to it and/or have the the full font as a reference. There are several letters and numbers which, when seen on their own, cannot be unambiguously deciphered.

That 5x8 font was completely legible to my six-decade old eyes! Sweet.

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