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5x5 Pixel font for tiny screens (Maurycy's blog)

Hacker News·Hacker News·about 1 month ago
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2026-04-18 — 2026-04-20 ( Programming ) Font data (C header) All characters fit within a 5 pixel square, and are safe to draw on a 6x6 grid. The design is based off of lcamtuf's 5x6 font-inline.h, which is itself inspired by the ZX Spectrum's 8x8 font. 5x5 is the smallest size that doesn't compromise legibility: 2x2 : Impossible. 3x3 : Technically possible, but unreadable. 4x4 : Not enough to draw "E", "M" or "W" properly. 5x5 : This font. Five by five is actually big enough to draw most lowercase letters one pixel smaller, making them visually distinct from uppercase. Narrower 4x5 and 3x5 dimensions are possible , but would require sacrificing the M, dotted zero, and reduce U/V/Y distinctiveness. There's no artistic reason to make all characters five wide just because a few must be... but a using a constant width makes programming a lot easier: The length of a string on screen is always 6 times the number of characters.…

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