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.

Indeed, and for upper/lowercase there's a reason why 5x7 has become a de-facto standard for character LCDs; the letters EeMmWw all have 5 "elements" horizontally, and vertically you'd want more than 5 in order to distinguish upper/lowercase.

The submission is really a 3x3 font on a 4x4 canvas, but your linked font is a 5x5 font that would (presumably) be on a 6x6 canvas.

Tasword on the ZX Spectrum used a font that fitted into 4x8 (so the characters were 3 pixels wide). It wasn't brilliant by today's standards, especially given it would usually be plugged into an 80s TV. However, this allowed 64 character lines on a 32x24 screen.

I worked for Tasman Software and answered lots of phone calls and written queries, so I know it was the first word processor used by a great many people. I wonder how many are now blind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasword https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum

Looks like the 5x5 example doesn’t even bother recreating lowercase letters.

I remember these from various forum signature prestige graphics lol

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.

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LASY OOO TED4PLTO7O TIMESY

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.