I recently put together some very small fonts (3x3, 3x4, 3x5, 3x6, 4x4, and 5x5) and tried to enumerate most of the possible glyphs as part of working on little projects on SSD1306 OLED screens: https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tiny-pixel-art-fonts/
My questions would be: is it possible to improve the visual results if we lift the restriction to only two levels of brightness of each pixel? I.e., would a use of proper grayscale allow creation of smaller fonts that are still readable, or allow more visually distinct and recognizable characters, than a binary font of the same size can have? Would designing a proportional typeface, as opposed to a monospaced one, help with minimizing the average advance width of the glyphs (averaged according to their frequencies in English text)?
Motivation: it is possible to reduce a book page, with ~80 characters per line, without any font hinting, without using any special fonts, using just common image manipulation tools, to just 240 pixels wide, and still get mostly readable words (but not individual letters). This is 3 horizontal pixels per glyph on average, including the gap - something that the demonstrated binary bitmap fonts don't achieve. Example: https://imgur.com/a/AlYrnSS
slightly tangential, but thank you! for the first time ever, the word "font" has been the appropriate word choice in the title, and we got a "typeface" claim.
When I read it, I immediately thought a braille typeface has a good claim on being the smallest. Would there be anything "enjoyable" to a blind person for a braille typeface to be available in different fonts? Italics? little tear drops, that sort of thing?
