It's the bees knees!

This is impressive. It *is* legible (I even found a typo ;-) ).
FWIW, the "B" and especially "D" look decidedly blue to me.

So, why an italic? Did you actually find it easier to make an italic than an upright font at this sort of size?

Interesting how the lowercase s and z require descenders to work with a 3-pixel x-height.

T

Piotr, thank you and welcome to Typophile. I think you just found a name for the font!

Nina, "e" is not done yet (it's copied "c") and this is why there are typos :-D. But I agree about glyphs being too blue, I have to correct them. As a consequence the counter will be darker.

Italic was chosen because the benefits of subpixel design are the most prominent. There just can't be a normal pixel font (in italic) and with such or even higher x-height – and still looking remotely as good.
Well I think italic is actually harder to do, but there are nicer glyphs possible! ("f", "z", upright parentheses, etc)

Well, 3-pixel x-height is certainly interesting! Small caps are going to be hard to do :-D

(Oh, and if you asking yourself why are there two lines of numbers. First line are old-style numerals, second will be lining.)

I didn't know png could hold subpixel information. What kind of software do you use?

I use Photoshop – when you see one pixel enlarged, you can control just its one color. But if you were watching physical pixel very closely (with microscope) you could find its three subpixels were changing. This thing is possible because of hardware. Specifically, this works only on LCD screens.

When you mix a color for one pixel, you use three sliders: each slider is actually for one subpixel. The tricky part is that you have to imagine color components, because full pixel colors which are displayed are confusing.
(Read about it on Wikipedia and here.)

I was thinking more why I started italic and not roman. I think because of all beautiful color patterns at 1600%. Also a little suprising fact, maybe: in all lowercase letters there are only three gray pixels (and all three are in "z")! Else are colors. Evenmore: in italic, there are no spaces between letters visible at 1600%.

The possibility of subpixel lettering isn't exactly exclusive to LCD monitors, but they certainly help.

Long ago I used to do subpixel editing for graphics in Pinball Construction Set on the Apple ][, including lettering with a technique not entirely unlike what is shown here. Back then, though, it was the limitations of the graphics system, including the relatively low screen resolution that made it possible, though crude, on a CRT monitor.

The Atari home computer systems (late '70s/early '80s) used a similar system with the character set. The "high res" graphics mode actually addressed half a "color clock" on color tv screens. To get a fully white dot on a black background, you had to plot two adjacent coordinates. Otherwise you would get a red or blue dot. You could also get solid red or solid blue by plotting only the odd or even coordinates. It worked very similar to the Apple II. In fact, Pinball Construction Set was able to be ported to the Atari with very little modification because of this (not to mention the fact that they had the same microprocessor).

Oh, and I was sure this is the first such font. Well maybe it is the first for LCD screens.

I have worked some more on it. I added a normal weight, which was much more easier to create than italic. Of course, it's clearly … or not so clearly not finished.

This is really cool!

How did you decide how to choose the pixel colors to address the subpixels? Are you using the [1/9,2/9,3/9,2/9,1/9] filter described by Steve Gibson in the link you mentioned above?

I am amused and impressed.

Isn't the hardware going to pose a problem? I mean, the color LED arrangement is not always R-G-B, there's also R-B-G and diagonal arrangements etc.

Believe me, I am amused myself :-). Specially when thinking whether it's worth to do monospaced numerals, case-sensitive parentheses and such.

Some colors were copied form Windows rendering and maybe mixed further (I have saved them in palette a very long time ago). I have five shades of both blue and red and three grays, but it's more important how you combine these colors.

In italic, stem is just a little less than 1 pixel wide. It is mostly presented with two pixels of red and blue: sometimes, it's dark red & light blue (pixel seems to be more on left); dark blue & light red (pixel seems to be more on the right); or both pixels of equal lightness. Actually I use this mentioned filter, but more from experience.

Italic glyphs always start with red and end with blue, because this way they can be set in words together without problems. For some glyphs, such as en dash, 70% (or less) gray color is used.

Hardware may be a problem, but most LCDs have the same positioning of subpixels.

Very impressive!

I'm also very impressed! The roman looks surprisingly legible on that size. I think the "s" with a descender would disturb the reading process a little bit.

Nicely done.

Has anyone built a chart that shows the relation between the specific colors needed to trigger the individual combination of sub-pixels?

Amazing work.

It would be interesting to see if legibility is different for a colour blind person.

Just a hunch, but colorblindness might improve legibility. The colors (I assume) are used to trigger a combination of the 3 sub-pixels.

Maybe 4 pixels in x-height could be also a good experiment. The "e" baseline alignment would be probably impossible using 3 of them.

Thank you for your kind comments! I had similar feelings, this is why I hurried and just had to post the typeface even with some glyphs not done.

Darrel: You can start by reading the two links I posted above and then study The bee's knees in detail. If you look at italic l or [ you will notice how pixels start to repeat and how diagonals are made.

I think legibility is the same or just minutely better for colour blind people. There was already discussion of this on Typophile, but some arguments were not even mentioned (for example, various combinations of color blindness type and text color give different legibility).

I decided to make the hard glyphs on the end … my excuse is until I finish program for automatic layout I can't quickly enough test them. Indeed the "e" and "s" are the most problematic. Maybe I can help with a two pixels x-height font? (here)

I just had a colour blind friend check it out and he confirms it is legible, and made the same suggestion that the condition may improve legibility. Probably one of the very few occasions where colour blindness could be of use.

Very interesting. When I look at the large, magnified .png above, it is illegible until I sit back and squint, thereby reducing the size and colour factor. Great work.

Amazed by the 3px x-height! Really impressive work, congratulations! :)

Adding some experimental bold weight (there could be bold and black weight) and some glyphs of bold italic, which will be as interesting to create as italic. Well, I chose to make additional weights first instead of mastering italic and roman.

It couldn't be any more different from David Farey's Beesknees so I don't think anyone would confuse the two, but you may wish to rethink the name of the typeface to avoid arm wrestling with ITC, Monotype, Linotype and Adobe.

Wow! that works distubingly good.

Just registered here to say that I think this is great. Well done! Keep up the great work.

ps: on the latest images, I see some background colour that is not quite white, especially around the lowercase italic m,n,o

Thank you for the tip, John, I really should checked this before … although there are small differences in names I think I will change it. Truthfully I didn't think a lot about it before. So, any suggestions? It could be deviant and represent something physically very small :-)

Ingrid, Matt, welcome to Typophile!
(there is indeed this not-really-white color, but unluckily not only there…)

"tnyfnt - a font so compact, we had to get rid of all the vowels in the name." ;)

It looks lovely, and is shockingly readable. Great work!

You could call it 'The Bis Nis', which could be read as either beesknees or business.

Really breathtaking. Keep going, I've never seen anything like this before.

You could call it Antonie.

Fleas' Knees?

Thanks for the welcome! I've already made a few blog posts on here ;)

I was chatting to a friend about this earlier and they said that there have been sub-pixel fonts on Nintendo DS for some time now (before 2005). Mainly on the homebrew scene, where they are used to fit more text on screen (text viewer, nethack game). They don't look as cool as yours, though! I am yet to see them first-hand on a DS.

http://gbax.gp2x.de/gbax2005.html
http://ds.qj.net/Textviewer-for-the-NDS/pg/49/aid/1520
http://stuartp.commixus.com/nhds/

ps: in Photoshop you can use the selection tool (with zero or low tolerance) and the "similar" menu command to select all the not-quite-white... if you want to change it to real-white.

Firmin Didot would've loved that ornamented specimen :D
The lining figure 1 is ambiguous the old style one is awesome though.
Is there a font format that supports colour?

Amazing work. I have never seen this before; really cool concept.

as for the name, I think mites are pretty small. 'Mite-y' or 'mite-sized' or something...

"mites"
Acarina sounds pretty good.
Or maybe a small venomous spider? Envia, Missulena? (There's more here.)

Thank you all for the suggestions! I was combining some names and made names such as The lengthy legs of little bees, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's type, Lawyer's fineprint, sbpx_fnt and Micrommata virescens' diary font (also possible Zilla diodia's diary font etc). Hard to choose one!

Johnny, this lining 1 is already on my to-do list :-) I chose to do such specimen (actually, this is font format, specimen will contain some short text!) because it nicely contrasts with new technology. The mix of old & new.

About this font being the first [subpixel] hand made … well maybe just bold italic is the first one? Here is the lowercase, still having troubles with e, s and this time also spacing:

This is really amazing work. Being somewhat graphically challenged myself -- and having tried to create readable favicons in the past -- I am just blown away by how readable it is.

I would definitely like to make use of this...Any idea what kind of license you'll be releasing it under? (Creative Commons, etc)

The enlarged image posted by miha suggests that it could be an effective captcha: I could only read "ipsum dolor" only at a distance and by crossing my eyes (and it looked black and white...). I wonder what a bot would have to do... Did you ever experiment with this?

I support 100% "Flea's Knees" as the cutest mini-"Bee's Knees" name.

Evan, I think I am going to release it under free* license (not yet, it is not finished). I know this has a drawback of a lot of potential misuses, but anyway. I also think I could sell it as well if I wanted, but its use is very limited – only for screen, only for small amounts of text.** Furthermore, it did take some time to create it, but time is not even remotely comparable to time spent drawing "normal" typefaces.

*CC, No Derivative Works & modified Attribution.
** I know creating bold and bold italic may be a sign of text typeface, but I just like doing it :-)

Of course, there will be a small Flash app to set text. But be patient :-P

About using it as a captcha: since letters start to repeat, it would't be so good.

BTW, welcome to Typophile, Evan, P.B. and Matthew.

This is very impressive, congratulations!

I have two monitors, one of which is rotated 90deg to the right. As expected, the font does not display as well on that rotated monitor. I was actually surprised it was readable at all!

I don't know that the pixel ordering in these panels is.

Bee's Knees is a FANTASTIC name for this font. Kudos for thinking of that when Piotr posted.

But please, in the name of taste, not "The Bis Nis" - ewww.

ah! jwr brings up an interesting issue with sub-pixel smoothing. I imagine that could be a big issue on iPhones.

I'm sorry if I'm pissing on the bonfire, but it looks just like the Mac OS X font rendering.

Uh, there's a pretty big difference between first subpixel font ever and first one you're aware of. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the Apple ][gs shipped with one in ROM; you missed this boat by more than 30 years.

The GameBoy Advance homebrew development community has been using them actively for more than ten years. I released a program that automatically dumped SPAA fonts for the GBA in probably 2003 or so. My old webpage has a 3xV (typically 2) font on it - significantly smaller than yours.

Please don't claim first ever when you haven't even tried looking to see if someone beat you to it. There are three bitmapped subpixel fonts on the first page of google hits for subpixel font.

This isn't actually impressive at all; the font on the GRC page from ten years ago looks just as good as this does. This is just a two-filter matrix applied to a larger font. Big whoop.

You'll find people get really bitter when you claim to have beaten them to the punch on something that's actually 30+ years old.

It's dishonest.

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

This is outstandingly neat

Sveinn: It looks better than I thought. Although I disagree: it looks worse (no dots on i, j; unreadable E, F and s if not set in context; no counter in B, 8 and maybe R). What about bold italic?

John Haugeland: I am very sorry if I was dishonest, I had no such intentions. There was actually a comment about being first one already and I suggested that maybe this is first such font for LCD screens (unlike Apple II). I also did a google search, but I found only automatically rendered subpixel fonts. Only later there was a comment that it is indeed not the first font … But is this the first font family? With roman, bold, italic and bold italic? (this is the most basic font family) I changed title to this.

BTW, I would love to see some examples of your (or someone else) hand-made subpixel typefaces.

“the font on the GRC page from ten years ago looks just as good as this does”
If you mean typeface used in menu, well, its x-height is more than twice bigger than mine. Not fair to compare.

Sooooo miha is dishonest for not thoroughly researching some obscure font that hasn't been in use for over a decade that no one has ever heard of?! Call the cops! He's a thief! Oh puh-leeze...

Fact is, this is brilliant work. It's perfectly fine that it may be copied work (or derived from another work), even if he was not aware of the prior works. He's not selling it as original art, but if he does, he would be fine there too because it IS original work. And besides, it's a typeface, not the Mona Lisa (sorry miha, it's good but not a priceless work of art).

One point to keep in mind is that there are usability considerations when using this typeface online. Just be careful what you use it for. Using it to depict thumbnails of documents or text: GOOD. Using it to render your entire blog post: BAD.

I love it! The colour fringing certainly brings back memories of the 8-bit days.

It looks good (although I see noticeable "rainbowing" on most glyphs, particularly on '<' and lower-case 'v' and 'w').

It'd be very useful for mobile phones with the little ~3cm x ~5cm screens - you should see if Opera and Google are interested for the mobile Java versions of Opera Browser and Google Maps.

Registered just to say I'm red-green colourblind and I can read it easily, from right up to the screen to about 1.5m away. :)

Amazing, Miha. We are working on kind of the same thing.

http://henrybirdseye.tv/art/legos/legos.html

Firmin Didot would’ve loved that ornamented specimen

I was thinking more Fournier. Actually, the proportions and slant of the italic also suggest Fournier to me. Congratulations on the first manual subpixel French neo-classical type.

Isn't any font "subpixel" if it's anti-aliased?

Squidbilly
"Sooooo miha is dishonest for not thoroughly researching some obscure font that hasn’t been in use for over a decade that no one has ever heard of?"

No, Miha is dishonest for claiming first ever without having put in any serious effort to find out whether that's true. (I maintain that not google searching the simplest possible phrase, subpixel font, is evidence that no serious effort was put in.)

Don't worry, Erly, I know yew kin't reed tew gud-like. I'll try to speak slower when you're around next time. (Miha: it's a reference to the television show from whence he draws his username and icon, not slander.)

Miha

1. "I am very sorry if I was dishonest, I had no such intentions."

   I realize that. The reason for the journalistic precept of not making sweeping statements without researching them first is to prevent unintentional dishonesty from still making one dishonest. Notably, your blog entry's title has not yet changed, nor has yet the text been amended; noting a wrong as intentional doesn't mean you shouldn't still clean it up.

2. "I suggested that maybe this is first such font for LCD screens"

   Well, you'd be wrong there too. Hence the bit about "please try checking before making the claim." Don't worry, Dorothy, you'll get there. Eventually.

   The Apple Newton and the Palm III both had SPAA color fonts. Incidentally, your font isn't for LCD screens; it's for right-bar screens. Many screens that aren't LCD are right-bar, and many LCD screens aren't right-bar. For example, the two screens on the Nintendo DS, which have had SPAA fonts in commercial use for nearly five years, are aligned differently to save on cable length, so your font doesn't apply to one of (I think the top, but forget) those screens.

   I'm sure there are earlier examples of LCD screens SPAA fonts, but I'm not a fontologist with a domain name that implies a deep familiarity with type, so I can only think of about a dozen counter-examples off of the top of my head. (Without research, the gameboy advance, the nintendo ds, the palm 3 and all following it, windows mobile both as bitmap and as cleartype, my apple iphone, the sega nomad, the apple newton, the google android, my canon vixie hf-200 camcorder's screen, the cybiko in monochrome, the Sony PSP, the Game Park GP-32 and all following it, and just to make it a baker's dozen, let's say the Nintendo DSi is a different machine than the DS.)

   But that's cool: if you don't know enough about the thing you're saying "first ever" in public about to think of those dozen plus obvious examples off the top of your head, there's always research.

   Try it some time.

3. "I also did a google search"

   Wow, one whole google search? That must have taken ages; I can see why you'd be surprised that such thoroughness might come up empty handed.

   So far I've been unable to think of a reasonable google search which doesn't find an example in the first two pages. Let's call it Google Anti-golf.

   What search did you use, please? I'm unable to replicate your failure even at the single attempt level. (Note the lack of pluralization in order to help you understand the quality and diligence of your research before declaring a world first, by the way. It's instructive. And hilarious. But mostly instructive.)

   If you didn't look at the second page of results, then it's a little easier to find queries that might fail; I've tried around 40 so far, and two have so far failed to give a first page result.

   And as we all know, there are only in fact ten things on the web, so looking at a second page before declaring a world first would be a waste of time.

4. "but I found only automatically rendered subpixel fonts."

   Well, that's curious. They're not hard to find. For example, my old website, sc.tri-bit.com, has four rendered PNGs of complete SPAA fonts in every flag combination of [bold, italic, underline, strike-through] (16 renders per font per size) at about half a dozen sizes per font, covering the entire publically released microsoft T series (tahoma etc), V series (verdana etc) and C series (candara etc).

   I mean it's not like they're on a page rank six blog too, or anything. Really, really hard to find stuff.

   And I mean, in the two minutes it took me to stop sadbear laughing, I found about a dozen bitmap SPAA rendered fonts in things like FLTK and older projects from SWAG.

   One of my font renders was the default font in the linux shell compiled for the Nintendo DS, last time I looked, if I remember correctly (if I'm wrong, Pepsiman will set me straight, but I think he was using one of my Consolas renders.)

   So yeah. I guess you looked pretty hard, huh?

5. "Only later there was a comment that it is indeed not the first font"

   Yeah, generally people can't leave comments about the wrongness of a claim to a world first before the claim is published. "Only later" is a side effect of our not being able to see web articles through time. You know, not being John Pertwee, it's a little hard to rustle up that kind of defiance of physics just to get some luls in on a blog.

Please amend the article and title (and this doesn't mean to a third wrong guess, this means to something simple and factual like "my first subpixel bitmap font"). The mistake is excusable; to err is human. Making a new false guess claim after your last false guess claim didn't work out isn't fixing an error, it's repeating an error.

Subpixel fonts are nothing new. They're 30 years old in a field with a 40 year consumer presence. You aren't getting a first here. Stop pretending, please.

-

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

DevilsAdvocado: no. Subpixel antialiasing is the practice of using the independant color channels in the pixel as if they were distinct grayscale positions, instead of using them as color, in order to triple the effective horizontal resolution (assuming a standard three-band arrangement like one finds in most LCD, plasma and OLED monitors), along with a little math hokey pokey to prevent color fringing.

You can see the difference by zooming way in on a screenshot of traditional AA and subpixel AA. The subpixel AA has colored edges because it's using the physical position of color channels like a mask, which the eye can sort out when it's at scale. There's an earlier post on this same blog about the youtube favicon; that's an example of the effect (the newer one, which is nicer, has colored edges because they're the rightmost and leftmost channel - red or blue respectively - being turned off to get graceful curves.

It's the difference between old style anti-aliasing and ClearType, if you're a windows user; ClearType is Microsoft's sub-pixel technology.

If you're interested, here's a pretty good beginners' tutorial. http://www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm

Subpixel antialiasing isn't actually antialiasing; it's a different addressing mechanism for physical screen positions. Boolean SPAA looks better than most antialiasing, but you can mix antialiasing with SPAA (that is, in that GRC tutorial, use the narrow grid but then use grayscale anyway) and get really gorgeous results.

The downside is the math for that is moderately expensive, because you have to do some filtering (usually a 1-2-3-2-1 filter) to get it to work, so if you're working on an embedded or portable device, you can expect slow results or large battery draw or both, depending on the device.

But it's totally worth it.

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

so when can I put this on my eeepc?

Miha: here's some of the extremely easily available documentation of your "first" for you, showing where Apple was implementing it in 1976 (so 33 years right there). Amusingly, it's a right-bar system on a CRT, because none of this has anything to do with LCDs, only with the physical color bar arrangement.

Oh, and it's on the first non-wikipedia site to come up on Google for subpixel.

Oh, and it's linked to on every single page, using the link text "the true origins of these ideas."

Oh, and he cedes that he has no idea where it comes from, despite having been involved with it probably before you were born and having seen it in use at Apple, IBM, Xerox, Microsoft and Koala. Because he doesn't have time to do the research.

http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm

Research.

Seriously, this information could not be any easier to find if it was nailed to your door by Martin Luther himself with a knife and a blood signature.

And GPS.

NeoArch: your EEEpc already does this.

Oh, also:

When you mix a color for one pixel, you use three sliders: each slider is actually for one subpixel.

Yeah, this isn't actually correct. This is correct when-and-only-when Photoshop's color model matches the monitor's color model. PNG has color model adjustment because that's essentially never true; even disregarding things like color temperature, the color base constants aren't actually fixed points, but rather chosen points in a range, and many manufacturers use subtly different colors (which is why photoshop has all that color registration stuff, so that different monitors working on adjacent projects wouldn't cause clashing results.) That has to do with what the underlying chemistry of the dyes used to mask the LEDs, dope the phosphors or light the OLED/Plasma are, and are the reason why certain manufacturers have such better performance in certain color ranges.

This is why Samsung makes a five channel monitor, too.

What you tried to say was:

"In a three color colorspace, the color output value can be used as a lightness control when thinking of the subpixels as grayscale values rather than chrominances. This is compounded by the fact that I'm working in Photoshop, which is going to screw with the colors I output in ways I apparently don't understand, which is why I'm having such difficulty with straight lines. But that's cool, because everyone's monitor is just like mine, which is why my LCD font looks wrong on about 20% of LCDs, and works on lots of CRTs and OLEDs and so on."

Stop using PNG for SPAA unless you're going to learn colorspaces, which are hard for color scientists (no, that's really a job), so you won't. Photoshop and PNG conspire to try to fix your work in colorspace, which is usually a good idea but murderous to SPAA. Switch to Targa or TIFF instead. PNG is lossless in a lot more ways than pixel values, and you actually want colorspace channel loss here, because otherwise it screws with your per-pixel calibration.

Incidentally, a photoshop user should be intimately familiar with that colorspaces don't match, that photoshop colorspace isn't monitor colorspace even when the names match, and that photoshop can switch between colorspaces within a single document, so those sliders obviously aren't subpixel values.

Here's X11 doing it in 1987: http://keithp.com/~keithp/subpixel/

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

I love this! Here's my little homage: a jQuery plugin to replace text on a page by characters from this font -- incomplete, impractical, and probably not compatible with very many browsers, but hopefully fun. http://osteele.com/sources/javascript/jquery.subpixelate/

Wow, StoneCypher is on a mission LOL.

He did this by hand in Photoshop, it doesn't matter if X11 did it in 87, ClearType does it now. He does it by hand. Are we seeing the difference here? I can barely appreciate the genuinely interesting things you had to say about color because you're so wrapped up in your bad attitude.

"Isn’t any font “subpixel” if it’s anti-aliased?"

It's rendered that way, though that info isn't necessarily a part of the font.

miha is pretty much hand-hinting letterforms specifically for optimized sub-pixel rendering at an x-height of 3px. So that's not the same as just letting the font-smoothing software do it for you.

StoneCypher: maybe so, but it doesn't look quite as good as these imo. my font size only goes down to 6 for most fonts.

StoneCypher: Six consecutive posts to snipe at someone's work is at least six too many. You've dragged the intelligence level of the whole site down by a full order of magnitude by subjecting us all to your verbal abuse of miha. Talent, which miha has clearly manifested in spades, trumps moral self-righteousness. It's a f**ing website, not a court of law. You pretty clearly created an account here specifically to put miha in his/her place, to accomplish what?

Grow up and let someone have a moment to enjoy being rightfully impressed with themselves for pulling off an impressive feat. Next you'll be telling kindergarteners that Santa Claus isn't real just to watch them cry.

Btw, what you tried to spell in your first post was "independEnt."

Spellchecker.

So easy, you don't even have to DO anything. You just wait for the little red line to show you that you're dumb. If you're going to be a pedantic pain in the arse, at least do us the favor of being impeccable yourself.

Please amend your post by typing out "I will not misspell independent" twenty times.

Would you like to verify for us that these previous subpixel fonts are in fact handmade, like miha's? My google finger is too tired to check.

aaaannd in comes StoneCypher with the Bonerkill...

John Haugeland: You wrote such a lenghty posts, but I am still missing an example of handmade subpixel font. [other than for Apple II]*

When I said "first subpixel typeface, ever" I meant a handmade typeface – because "pixel fonts" are handmade and most obviously, fonts are rendered with subpixel technology for millions of users for a years now. How on earth could mine typeface be the first one that is "rendered" using subpixels?

“Because he [I] doesn’t have time to do the research. http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm”
Did you even read my post earlier in this thread? I already gave the link to this wonderful website, which BTW doesn't mention hand-optimised subpixel fonts.

“unless you’re going to learn colorspaces”
Actually I already know about it a lot. I had one semester of Color mesauring and another of Color managament. Also, I had an assignment for Color managament in Photoshop. Believe me, I know what I am doing. A single statement on which you based your whole comment was simplified. Ironically, your comment about color managament is simplified too.

Oliver, can you add a license information that generated images are released under this license: CC by-nd 2.5 with an addition that all generated images will be changed once I finish my typeface. I may latter also change rather restrictive conditions for attribution to less restrictive ones.

* I was able to find only one subpixel font for Apple II (of course font doesn't work with current technology of most web users). And is't only a typeface, not a type family.

This thread is becomming a negative one. Some of you may be more polite, although if you are saying the right thing. :-(

I recommend ignoring John Haugeland

This is great work, even if it might be lost on the majority of people :)

Nice work!

Regardless of weather this is a first in any sense, I like your design.

I've not seen, in samples posted here by your detractors, or elsewhere, subpixel coloring used to make such fine little glyph shapes.

Keep up the good work!

PS: Mr Haugland, you made your point in your first post. With every extra post you add you seem ever more obsessive and weird. If you browse around this site you'll find that the tone of conversation here is polite and grown up. Criticism is usually constructive (and not repetetive, we're trying to help each other, not win an argument that no-one but us wants to participate in), and to the point. And you've made yours.

Oliver, can you add a license information that generated images are released under this license: done.

This thread is becoming a negative one: This and this might be useful.

Very neat. But alpha blending to anything other than white will be cumbersome. Using your palette and brush method you’ll basically have to redo it all each time. With a more automated method you could do alpha blending in each RGB channel separately.

dst.r += (src.r - dst.r) * alpha.r;
dst.g += (src.g - dst.g) * alpha.g;
dst.b += (src.b - dst.b) * alpha.b;


John Haugeland, your style sucks, but thanks for a lot of interesting information.

Miha, I can feel your enthusiasm. Wonderful work!

Ken Perlin's 2006 efforts: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/homepage2006/tinyfont/index.html

totally awesome. congrats miha! nice work, indeed.

the name should be simple...i like 'tiny' or 'fine print'
also, i have a question (non-typographer here so forgive me if it's stupid)...do the letters overlay? i.e. is the leftmost pixel in the 'e' the same when it follows an 'o' as when it follows an 'l' ?
also, you got some love from metafilter...

David Jones, thank you very much for the link! I really didn't know wether it was my typeface that it was first or not, but now all doubts are gone. Well, probably mine is still the first type family [like it says in the title], but anyway: all the glory should go to Ken Perlin! :-)

About his font: he actually had a little different intentions than me. I also wanted to design the smallest typeface, but with style comming before being the smallest (actually, I like style in both italics). My typeface has 1 pixel lower x-height, but has ascenders & descenders; and even by cropping them I wouldn't fit more text than him.

I like his typeface! But for my taste there are a bit too much pronounced colors. Despite stronger colors it has one huge difference: not all its glyphs are made the same, which leads me to conclusion that it was actually at least partially programmed. I would love to know more! If it was programmed, rendering engine was probably programmed specifically for this font. In this case, I would still consider it "handmade", and mine respect would even deepen.

Maybe it's strange, but I am not dissapointed because of this. I think I am getting more excited!

Matt Sephton: "I recommend ignoring John Haugeland"
I will, I see it was my mistake responding. His posts are actually the most impolite I've seen for some months on Typophile.

Tobias, I think that you can't do it as easily. While alpha is correct, color should change too. Because I used a consistent color pallete searching & replacing each color with a different set of colors would be trivial. I used 4 shades of red, 5 of blue and I think 3 grays. With white as a background.

"Actually, the proportions and slant of the italic also suggest Fournier to me. Congratulations on the first manual subpixel French neo-classical type."
John, this was almost exactly what I tried. I wanted to do a garamond-styled italic. I have still more room for experimetations. I will certainly try more slanted italic "A" and "f". Also I really love OsF, they are really appropriate.

This time, there is no update in design, I am too busy reading retweets :-P. But just for fun, can you guess what is below:

Steve, this is also new for some type designers.

Letters are almost always the same, but sometimes when manually setting the text you have to erase the leftmost pixel to get the spacing right. I think you may read Wikipedia page about subpixel rendering and maybe this.

Miha: I'm impressed with your font, Miha. I'd really love to see it when it's complete.

StoneCypher: Even if you are actually correct, it is not at all acceptable to speak to people the way you have been. There are ways to communicate without making everyone hate you. As someone who doesn't even disagree with you, it is hard not to completely disregard what you have to say due to your overwhelming arrogance. You're obviously intelligent, so I'd suggest that you behave than a thirteen year old forum troll.

Miha: oh, now it has to be hand made? That's quite new. If you had said that before I would have pointed you to the several I've made or the dozen-odd I've collected over the years. I can also direct you to the webpages of various people who have made them and released them freely on the web. I'm sure you'll then change your blog title to "first hand-made subpixel font in photoshop ever", which will also be wrong.

There are about a dozen in circulation for the GBA, all of which were hand made. Many of the fonts I've pointed you to were hand made. And, of course, the very first example I gave you, the Apple ][ ROM font, was also hand made, as were about half of the other examples I gave you.

You're just making claims based on guesses and acting like there's nothing wrong with that.

I notice that you've picked a third completely wrong guess about your being first, and used that as your latest false unresearched claim about your world firsts.

Please stop making false claims. You aren't even trying to research them. People are repeating your claims as if they were fact. You are building a reputation based on things you made up.

The first time it was an understandable mistake. The second it was a not-understandable mistake. By now, the third time, I'm hoping you'll learn your lesson about basic honesty: don't make claims if you don't know them to be true.

Unfortunately I'm learning that you won't do that, and your readership is becoming extremely abusive.

Please fix your post title to something that is honest, instead of making yet another false claim to a first. You've made the same dishonest class of statement three times in a row, now. The first you posited as an honest mistake. I notice you haven't tried to explain the other two as such.

Also, now there are people on MetaFilter claiming I'm wrong, based on that they developed fonts for Newton and believe that means they know everything any Newton application ever did, and I'm not willing to pay five dollars to set the record straight. One fish Two fish Red fish Blue fish, if you would like a hand finding apple newton applications using subpixel fonts, please contact me directly instead of telling a bunch of people I won't pay to talk to that I'm wrong. I'm not hard to reach, and you should probably ask me where those applications are before saying I'm wrong in public.

I released some of the software you're claiming I'm wrong about, so you might feel like an authority, but hey, so do I. It seems likely that I know more about the software I released than did a guy who made vector fonts.

It is unfortunate that the people here are so happy to condescend to me, when I was initially polite and did not become rude until the dishonesty was repeated, yet are all over a minor font designer who has hand-rendered a subpixel font 33 years after the technology went to market, and made repeated false claims about firsts afterwards.

It's almost like you guys aren't offended by being lied to.

"PS: Mr Haugland, you made your point in your first post."

Obviously not; the post is newly dishonest twice, and still is as we speak, on the back of data which is refuted by said first post. Indeed, Miha has ceded the first to Ken Perlin, who acted more than 30 years after the examples I gave her, yet still has not amended her blog title or text.

If you hadn't realized, she's trying to become famous by claiming something she didn't do, knowing that most people who repeat the work won't read the comments, and so her name will be on everyone's blog for achieving something she even now admits herself she did not actually achieve.

It's bothersome that someone would claim someone else's success this way. I'm friends with several of the people who performed these steps most likely before Miha was born, and they are legitimately offended by this person lying and stealing their thunder.

If you guys are angry because I brought facts to the table? Well, too bad.

This doesn't go to Ken Perlin, who is a great guy, and who I miss talking to.

This probably goes to Steve Wozniak, who as I already told Miha a day before she decided to credit Ken, hand-made a family of fonts for right-raster subpixel rendering in 1976.

She just doesn't care to be honest about the data she was provided because her fans have decided to tell me I'm a bad, bad man, in much harsher tones than the tones they're complaining about.

Compelling stuff, really.

We'll see whether Miha ever becomes honest. At this point, I'm not holding my breath.

Well roared, lion! But drop it now please.

Besides, probably the »first page of google hits« would have revealed the likely gender of a person from Slovenia named Miha.

John: I think your argument is absolutely fine, but I still want to ask you to tone down the angry voice. Being ridiculed in public is no good experience, not for any of you. My advice is to continue this talk in private. I'm sure, if you let him, Miha can learn tons from you! You clearly have a lot of interest in the subject, and he seems eager to learn.

Frode: I'll speak as I see fit, thanks. Should someone ever take credit for your work thirty years late falsely in public three times in a row, I should hope you also have a friend who will stand up for you.

I was polite the first time. When the false claims continued, that changed.

As far as Miha learning from me, I have a fascination with honesty in those I choose to teach. Given that Miha has already made three distinct false claims, and that Miha has chosen to say her mistake was to respond to me at all, I don't think either party involved is interested in such an arrangement.

It's been more than a day. It's been several distinct communications. It's time for the masquerade to end.

"Besides, probably the »first page of google hits« would have revealed the likely gender of a person from Slovenia named Miha."

Yeah, I used to date a Slovak named Miha who was a girl. I'd have thought had I that wrong, s/he would have said so.

As I understood it, it's like Dale, Carol or Sammy: it can be either, but it's usually female. If that's wrong, s/he should probably mention it.