This is my attempt to make the smallest possible font. Each character fits inside a 3x3 pixel square (4x4 pixels if you include the space between characters). This font can be useful where pixel space is at a premium, like on an LED matrix or a mechanical display.
I don't consider this a truly complete font because there is no distinction between the capital letters and small letters. Also, some of the special characters can be difficult to descern without context. Nevertheless, this font can create readable text strings and convey information using a minimum of resources.
I am publishing this font under a Creative Commons license, so that anyone can use it for any purpose. Attribution is appreciated but not required.
Leave a comment if you make something cool with it!
James Robert Patrick IV
This is a basic font for building words, each letter is one block made of a 3x5 composite, somtimes with stacking. Wish this were not a clone, since it is a root clonable from which clones can be made. Some letters need nudging when building words: Nudge left: filt, Nudge right: mvw. The numbers need to be nudged down. The lower case letters are designed to not touch either the top or the bottom of the edge of the brick (except the g).
This is a clone of DungeoneerA compressed, squareish microfont. 4x4, monospaced, no wasted matrix.
I like how this one uses all the space it occupies. Glyphs like ijl1 fill out the words they're in rather than creating voids. Also, i looks kind of like a lit candlestick, and I like that.
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Original size: 3pt (use multiples of this size for pixel perfection)
An experiment to see if 3x3 fonts are more legible when drawn in negative space. I consider this to be not only a success, but also the most readable 3x3 design I have seen - particularly the uppercase.
The successors Megashark and S.D.M.G. are more useable and more stylish respectively, while Minishark strikes a good balance.
This is considered an E3x3 because, while it's created in a 5x5 grid, it has an effective drawing area of only 3x3. The outermost square only has pixels drawn in it when the interior design dictates such.
3x3 cipher, based on version 0.3 of "Micromaze". It uses its own form of binary notation for the numerals, wherein the upper-right 4 pixels play the role of the 1, 2, 4, and 8.
This is the smallest font in which I was able to give a unique symbol to every glyph (excluding the lower/upper case, which look the same). It reads sort of like Pigpen Cipher, but is more densely written.
Since MMC is obscure and of constant width/height, it serves many "gibberish" and "placeholder text" purposes in addition to being a modestly strong cipher.
Original size: 2pt (use multiples of this value for pixel perfection)
My attempt at a font which uses only one grid square per glyph. I guess this is the Fontstruct equivalent of pixel art...?
As an extra challenge I decided to use no curved bricks. (This rule was since broken to add © and ®).
Even better letterforms could be created by compositing the entire thing. However, the goal here was to do what I could with the existing bricks. As such, only #?![]{}¹²³ make use of composites.
An even more condensed variant of CG pixel 4x5, this is just about as small as a B&W pixel font can get. This is the monospace version of the font.
This is a clone of CG pixel 3x5A tiny but surprisingly legible 4x5 pixel font originally designed for a "code golf" competition. Includes all printable ASCII characters (with identical lowercase and uppercase letters). This is the monospace version of the font.
This is a clone of CG pixel 4x5