Dilettante Habits

Knowing nothing about everything

Size-Minimal Fonts


Topics: typography



Given a limited amount of pixel-space, size-minimal fonts - or character sets - become an interesting topic. In the following, some thoughts about them are given.

Capital Chars

How could a size-minimal font look like? When looking at upper case characters only - and only plain Latin characters - the vertical size is mainly determined by the maximum of horizontal bars, which is three (like in 'B'). There is only one upper-case character that usually has a descender (lies partially below the baseline), which is the upper case 'J'. Sometimes, this is also the case for 'G' and/or 'Q'. We disregard the descender at first. Consequently, we have three horizontal bars, and given the fact that they must be separated, the minimum height is five.

Characters have different widths. 'M' and 'W' have a larger width while an 'I' is usually thin. But disregarding 'M' and 'W', all other characters can be drawn using a width of three pixels as some have left and right vertical bars, and a dividing white space.

A Basic Size-Minimal Font

Figure 1 shows a basic size-minimal charset with 3x5 pixels per character, with additional two pixels for both, 'M' and 'W'.

Figure 1: Basic size-minimal char.

Some notes:


In the following, variations of some characters are given.

Figure 2: Upper-case character variations.


From the given variations, one could build a "round" and a "rectangular" charset.

Figure 3: Upper-case "round" (top) and "rectangular" (bottom) character sets.

Lower-case Characters

Lower case characters have three horizontal lines as well, like in 'e'. Additionally, some have both, a descender and an ascender like in 'f'. The ascender may have only one line in height. This is not possible for the descender, because an extra horizontal bar is needed as the case for a 'g'. Consequently, a lower case character set could be drawn with a height of eight pixels. The constraints for the width are similar to the ones of the upper-case charset. Only the 'n' can be represented in three rows instead of the four needed for an upper case 'N'.

Figure 4: Basic size-minimal lower-case charset.

Some notes:



Figure 5: Lower-case character variations.


Again, the "round" and the "rectangular" combinations are given in the following image.

Figure 6: Lower-case "round" (top) and "rectangular" (bottom) character sets.

Full Characters


The next figure shows some combinations.

Figure 7: Full "round" (top) and "rectangular" (bottom) character sets.

Closing Thoughts



One may note that the fonts used herein use only two colours - black and white. One could assume that even smaller charsets could be generated when using different shades of grey, imitating antialiasing.


Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported licence
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