I've been messing around with tiny fonts and decided to see how small I could draw the 10 numbers and 6 letters required to display hexadecimal digits. After plenty of experimentation, I came up with a font as small as 2x3 pixels (with a bitdepth of just 1 bit). I'm not sure how legible it is in general, but to someone who's been trying out different font-sizes, I've already trained myself to recognise them. So far, only my 3x5 font seems to be clearly legible, but I'm not sure about the others I came up with.

Attached are the fruits of my labours. Also attached is a 2-bit 3x2 and 4x2 font, but adding a shade of grey doesn't seem to improve things much.

Do you find these fonts legible? Can you do any better?

AE.

Yeah, I can read them all, but it hurts the eyes

The bottom-right font in the first image is the easiest to read, IMO.

What happens if you use a ClearType style (Drawing in 24-bit color, using the r, g, and b as individual pixels)? Then a 2X3 font would actually be 6X3. I say try it with a 2X5 font.

http://www.dittoditto.com/content/?p=407

I agree, the 3x5 fonts (the second to last one especially) are the only reasonably legible ones.

3x4 might pass as legible but I imagine when you get to q and x etc it won't.

In the magnified version you can definitely read most of the 1 bit fonts without problems (keeping in mind that you're only doing hex digits). Maybe the ones in the first row are a bit hard to recognize. The 2 bit fonts continue to be quite illegible to me.

The full ASCII font looks fine, particularly in the zoomed version.

Having the digits in order gives the reader enough clues that they will think it's readable even if it isn't. You should post the digits in a random order and then see how people do

Anyway, this prompted me to mess around with the BBC computer's Teletext graphics. If a character with a code from 145 to 151 is output, then for the rest of the line, any character with bit 5 (32) set will be interpreted as graphics. First I reminded myself which of the other bits from 0 to 6 corresponded to which pixels.

{"name":"bbchexfont1.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/5\/4567490b15f939c3f8c6310f79769209.png","w":652,"h":537,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/4\/5\/4567490b15f939c3f8c6310f79769209"}

AU. is short for AUTO; P. for PRINT; V. for VDU. The last-mentioned takes character codes and invokes the Operating System's 'write character' command.

You can see I forgot that BBC BASIC doesn't support the += operator. Then I ran into trouble with the OS's Teletext output algorithm: it remaps #, £ and _ to resolve a discrepancy between the Teletext chip and the rest of the computer, and it interprets 127 as delete (of the backspace variety). So I tried again, this time with bit 7 set. None of the 128-255 range have special meanings to the OS, and the Teletext chip ignores bit 7. In both cases, I had an extra '>' prompt on the same line, which got reinterpreted as graphics, and which I ignored.

Then I chose a new colour and coded Andrei's digits, along with a space after each one. (Lines 90 and 100 scrolled off the top, but they just say "P.".) Unfortunately, it didn't occur to me to do them in a random order.

{"name":"bbchexfont2.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/1\/016726e0dca40fe7726b26d8ab4c9044.png","w":652,"h":537,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/1\/016726e0dca40fe7726b26d8ab4c9044"}

[EDIT]
The fact that we've gone from that to

{"name":"portal4dimensionsno3.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/1\/81cde3d088c80473f85abf7dd4ad9516.jpg","w":1440,"h":900,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/1\/81cde3d088c80473f85abf7dd4ad9516"}

is making me feel seasick

With the cheats it is actually a 4x6 font. Here is an Allegro 4.4 font file useable with load_font. You can say the smallest readable Allegro font...

Again, the square 3x5 font (squared off one) is the only one that doesn't require a good deal of inspection of the glyphs, you can just read like normal.

That's true about the 0, I agree... I find most or all of the other glyphs easier to read in the squared version though.

You need to randomise your letters/numbers otherwise your brain will fill in the gaps and guess the correct ones more easily, making the experiment pointless.

Sorry, i don't understand where there is a "cheat" because it is obviously that it is a 4x4 font. And many characters are impossible to read, and are not even similar to the original characters, like the 4, 8, S, g, m, w, which are most damaged.