How inefficient! It only takes 10 distinct black-and-white pixels to represent 1000 distinct glyphs. Even low-res bitmap fonts are usually at least 6x6 pixels in size, meaning that we can use them to represent numbers in base 2^36. And with modern high-DPI screens we have easily enough room for glyphs that are 30 pixels square, letting us represent numbers in base 2^900. But why limit ourselves to black and white? We have the full 8-bit color space to work with, letting us devise a numeral system that can easily represent (2^24)^900 numbers using the space of a single glyph. :)