At the other (and more preferable) end of the solution: What current technology offers the most pixels per square inch? How far away are we from a 1080p PDA/smartphone screen?
Work amazingly well. Is there a barrier to this being available as an ordinary font?
> In contrast, I’ve noticed that Microsoft’s smallest screen fonts are unreadable, whereas their smallest readable screen fonts are way bigger than necessary. “
Interesting, given ClearType (an example in "Microsoft’s Creative Destruction" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100377):
"It worked by using the color dots of liquid crystal displays to make type much more readable on the screen"
BTW, if you want to quickly see how this text looks on an iPhone, etc, I made a shortlink direct to the demo image so it's easier to type on there.. http://bit.ly/tinytext
This is something that's bugging me about the iPad. Since the screen is 1024x768 (and TFTs are typically manufactured in portrait), I wonder if the pixels are oriented vertically rather than horizontally when you're in portrait mode. If so, the font rendering for books could be horrible compared to if you had it in landscape.
As far as I can tell the iPhone/iPod Touch don't use subpixel rendering, just antialiasing. The display is dense enough that (to my eyes at least) it really doesn't matter. Likely this will carry forward to the iPad, which has a slightly less-dense display -- ~130dpi vs. ~160dpi -- but which will also be viewed from a little farther away.
Would it be possible in the future to supplement our existing font formats to have two versions, one for subpixels one way, and one for the other (so that the OS could transparently switch between which version to use)? Or am I misunderstanding how subpixel fonts work?
That depends on if it's a bitmap font or not. If it is bitmap, then it's already subpixel rendered, and you would need two different bitmaps depending on orientation. If it's truetype or similar, you would need a font renderer that was capable of subpixel rendering, and it would then have to render it differently depending on orientation.
However, subpixel rendering works because you effectively triple the horizontal resolution. If you flip your screen, you now have normal horizontal resolution, but triple the vertical resolution, which is less useful for rendering fonts, and it would of course also not look the same as the horizontally subpixel-rendered font.
So for devices like that, it's probably best to simply not do it and get a dense enough display that you won't need it.
Also, does anyone know if subpixel rendering works on OLED screens?
Basically: This font is created such that it looks good when subpixel-rendered at a size of 3px. If you wanted text larger than 3px, you would not ever want to use this font, you would use something else that can either be regularly rendered at your chosen size, or subpixel-rendered at your chosen size.
It's a bitmap font, so it scales as any pixels would but far from well when it comes to readability. If you look at the 1600% up-scale you get a good idea what I am talking about.
I remember making these types of fonts myself back in the Amiga days just to fit it on bootsector(s) (memory fails me here, was it one or two?). The difference then was that sub pixel rendering was not an option, and fixed width fonts at this size always looked bad (i vs m), so you'd have to be careful how you wrote things. :-)
Without having ever experimented with subpixel rendering I am intrigued by the fact that « is made a whole lot more "blue" than » -- spontaneously one would think it would simply be a matter of mirroring the glyphs (obviously not) :)
If you want to experiment with subpixel rendering, and you have a reasonably modern Firefox, I made a subpixel-rendering toy a while ago: http://zork.net/~st/Toys/subpixel-sketch.html
