First subpixel typeface, ever | Hacker News Reader

First subpixel typeface, ever

typophile.com

192 pointsrobin_reala40 comments

You must not look too closely, because colors get visible

That happens with any anti-aliasing. After using a Mac for some time, what bothers me about ClearType to no end is that for some fonts, the colors are painfully visible without looking closely. Without exaggeration, it looks like shit smeared on the text.

Color is only visible in sub-pixel antialiasing. Regular AA, or AA designed for something other than LCD output, is just shades of gray.

And in any case sub-pixel color artifacts were a fact of life for decades when we were all using CRTs. I don't remember anyone complaining about all those visible phosphors then.

Regardless: am I the only one who doesn't see much value here? The icons earlier were arguably more readable, but the colors are nonetheless a little distracting. And I have a strong suspicion from comments (some very positive, some like me much less impressed) that these images are being tuned very heavily to a particular LCD design, or pixel pitch, and aren't as generically useful as people think.

This font should work fine on any standard LCD, as long as the OS is not trying to apply any other kind of sharpening or AA overtop of it. However, it will only work correctly if it's rendered 1:1 at the resolution of the monitor -- it can't be scaled at all, so the final size will be dependent on the ppi of your display.

Indeed. Especially the serif fonts look awful to me on cleartype. I use Safari for this reason alone.

It might not be the first, and it might not be terribly useful, but it is interesting.

In that regard, is it art?

Of course.

No, not in the sense of "fine art" like Michelangelo, that is a different kind of thing. It's a human artifact, it's design and engineering. And I would argue that art does have a purpose, greater than, say, entertainment.

I'd put it at the boundary between art and craft...

... and I don't understand that you got down-modded for your constructive comment.

what define art is lack of purpose. that's why I call most of my hacks art.

Strictly speaking, if it has no purpose you wouldn't do it. Your hacks may be for learning, entertainment, distraction, avoiding work, etc. Art has a different and distinct purpose, more along the lines of emotional fuel. This is why I disagree with PG about Hackers and Artists. Engineering, design, cool hacks, craft, etc may be exhilarating, but it's not about emotions the same way art is. These are great things on their own, they don't need to steal the word art to be great.

3 pixels high, that's has to be pretty rare.

Here's another but this one's full height and width of each character is 3 pixels, only capitals and numbers are used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3x3

This service lets you render your own text in 3x3: http://bikko.org/practice/3x3/index2.php

Image of full typeface in 3x3: http://imgur.com/61375.gif

Interesting. The legibility isn't even comparable to the subpixel font in the OP, however.

This guy's done some very interesting stuff on typophile.

In fairness, in the linked post, only the x-height of each character is 3 pixels. The task the designer of 3x3 set for himself was to create a typeface where each character could only be 3 pixels high and wide at most. That said, the work in the linked post is a very clever and precise exercise in optical illusion. It works wonderfully and is ideal for cases where a design calls for legibility at such a tiny size.

It's actually quite useful for a variety of purposes. One example is favicons which could contain text in this face.

If you're putting text in a favicon you're doing it wrong.

Look up

Lots of brands have been putting text or characters in favicons-- Facebook, Twitter, and Y-Combinator, to name a few. I think it makes the brand more recognizable.

A character or two is not 'text'. And you don't need sub-pixel techniques during image creation to pull it off.

It is highly useful for EULAs and Terms of Service.

See: http://typophile.com/node/60577

YouTube and BBC icons with improved readability.

What if my monitor gets rotated?

Sub-pixel anti-aliasing belongs to the low-level font renderer, the part that knows how the sub-pixels are arranged in the current canvas.

Just blindly assuming a given arrangement is neither particularly clever nor future-proof. It's not even present-proof (I use a notebook attached to a rotated LCD display at work and a netbook attached to a big CRT at home) as many displays are designed to rotate (thus changing the sub-pixel arrangement).

I once wrote a 3x3 pixel bitmap (just 1-colour pixels) font on my ZX Spectrum in Art Studio! The main problem was the S - it had to have a diagonal.

Note: This I believe only works on LCD based displays. Which is still very useful.

It only works on LCD based displays where the subpixel layout is RGB. Some old ones are GBR.

Also won't work if your monitor is flipped sideways.

And many mobiles, which is one of the few places where this font could potentially shine.

No, I'm looking at it on a CRT display (model GT775 of the brand ViewSonic). It still works.

The font from Screenwriter ]['s 70-column mode in hgr2 for non-80 column Apple ][s may qualify as the first subpixel typeface.

http://books.google.com/books?id=zBIvBTsHbtUC&lpg=PA118&...

I remember that one. And man, did it look awful on a color TV. You really needed a dedicated monochrome monitor to make that one work.

I badly miss the ability to move something half a pixel to the left ;-)

Newbies will never know what it is to wield such power

How so? The Apple's high-res graphics mode was 280 pixels wide, the standard ROM font drew characters 7 pixels wide to achieve 40 characters per line; it sounds like ScreenWriter II drew characters 4 pixels wide to achieve 70 characters per line (a bit cramped, especially for M and W, but doable). What is 'subpixel' about that?

It's not really 280 pixels wide: there are 280 addressable pixels but changing one can affect another nearby. Drawing diagonal, intersecting lines can make your blue lines green or whatever. Loosely speaking, there are 280 sub-pixels across, which works fine on monochrome monitors but on color monitors screenwriter's 70 column mode is psychedelic.

What does it mean that it's "sub pixel" ?

Given that each character is several pixels tall and wide, that seems like a misnomer, unless I'm missing something...

It means that the anti-aliasing is done with the positions of individual RGB components in mind instead of treating whole pixels in a grid as the fundamental abstraction.

It allows for smoother anti-aliasing at the cost of some portability (things change if the display is rotated, not all displays have the same sub-component configuration, etc).

It’s sub pixel in the respect that it independently uses every controllable dot on your display (three for every pixel, red, green and blue) to create the illusion of black lines. Zoom in on the font and you will see that no pixel is actually black or grey. It uses the underlying hardware structure of the pixel display. It basically doesn’t manipulate the abstract and perfect pixel (throw three colors at a small square and get the combination of the three perfectly distributed across the surface of the square) but the underlying hardware structure of pixels. That’s the reason why it breaks on different or rotated hardware.

Finally, some real hacking on hn.

No Q, V, nor Y?

And the "e" is just a copy of the "c". That's why he wrote "Lorim ipsum".

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