Gregory's ServerSo cool! A one-pixel-wide font that exploits subpixels.
(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/slGDHG3oyt)
 76 comments
erm i actually knew about this like weeks ago because of my gf!!! soooooooo- :JuneHazel:
 @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf I have pretty thick concave glasses, and I can make the numbers in the second and third pictures get wider or thinner by turning my head to take advantage of the chromatic aberration in my specs.  @chrisphin @darkling It gets better: I can look at the part where the blocks are actually genuinely one on top of the other, and make the numbers appear by turning my head due to the same chromatic aberration effect! (Though I wish the blue was brighter)  @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf Ah! I did this manually a while ago but didn't realise it was possible to set up a font to do the same thing.  @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf @sjolsen for fun I tried to see if I could use this in practice once and, almost. It was almost legible when I was in my early 20s. Now not so much. :) @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf Finally a way to put 1920 columns of numbers on my 4k screen, so that I can see the whole of my colleagues excel files from hell without scrolling sideways! @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf Made a low res png from it, if someone wants to try it out quickly. It looks bad on mastodon, but if you download it and show it with 100% you get the desired effect.  @chrisphin unfortunately, display profiles kind of ruin the effect (explainer: the image is being interpreted as sRGB, and since my display has a wider gamut than sRGB, and the rendering stack is built around the assumption that each pixel represents an atomic color sample, the "pure" red, green, and blue pixels encoded in the file are having some of the other primaries mixed in to bring them closer to the sRGB primaries, resulting in some subpixels getting activated when they aren't meant to) @chrisphin for reference: same camera settings, same display, but viewing the image in an application that does not interpret it as sRGB (instead interpreting it in the display's native color space) @sjolsen Looks great! And yes, anything that messes with the colours will skew the effect of course. Thanks for the empiricism!  @chrisphin @sjolsen also, any amount of scaling with the font will break it. i'm sure that one is pretty obvious, though @chrisphin @sjolsen oh! and some displays, the red/green/blue isn't oriented in the "stoplight" fashion as shown in these images - other common configurations include a "triangle" pattern, or a "square" pattern with an extra green pixel element. the font won't work with those, obviously @chrisphin I guess I should explain because the end result is a bit neater than "some game gear games do it." The Sega Game Gear is actually just a portable revision of Sega's previous home console, the Sega Master System, which competed against the NES before the Sega Genesis. Only difference is the resolution, the Game Gear has a screen with a resolution of 160x144, while the SMS ran in a resolution of 256 ร 192, however 8 pixels on each side are considered overscan, so 240x192... @chrisphin 240 is bigger than 160 horizontal resolution, so game gear games usually would adapt the game to work only in a 160 pixel horizontal window. However, the Game Gear itself could run Master System games directly on the hardware by popping in real SMS carts with a converter, so the game gear needed to be able to internally map 240 lines of resolution to 160 lines. In fact, some retail GG games would just be repackaged SMS carts, no cropping internally. @chrisphin So, when the GG detects it's running an SMS cart due to a flag not being set within the game, it'll run in subpixel resolution mode, where horizontal pixels are split among subpixels on the LCD automatically. Simultaneously, it'll do a 3:2 pulldown of the vertical resolution. It's not quite like explained in the OP, but it's the same concept, and it's done automatically in hardware: @chrisphin Games which you can easily see this with include Castle of Illusion on the GG, which is just a repackaged SMS cartridge and thus runs in 240 horizontal mode. @chrisphin The whole system is so cool with this stuff. If you look at a vertically running bar of 2 pixel height on the screen and have it scroll downward in slow motion, you can actually see the vertical pull down in motion. Probably my favorite retro handheld.  @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf Makes me realise I could recognise all of them with only the 3 center rows. @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf This is awesome but I also hate this very much ๐ซ @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf i use this to decorate top of my portfolio the same way Antonio Prohรญas would use morse code in the design of his comics :] @chrisphin I wonder if legibility improves if you reduce G and R channels to match the perceptual brightness of blue. @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf I want to try this on a small microcontroller display. The standard there is 3x5, would be cool to see a 1x5 on it   @chrisphin Someone's been doing this for years, apparently - https://www.msarnoff.org/millitext/ @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf I remember subpixel fonts being used on Ben NanoNote to fit more text in the console, but those didn't go as far as being 1 pixel wide ๐ @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf Great, because more less readable fonts is what we need! XP @chrisphin @C_Chell @renard I have no love for Reddit the company especially following the API debacle, but I donโt believe this is true. Content should be viewable without logging in. Iโm happy to be corrected! The original comment suggested there was something specific about /s/ links, but Iโm not familiar with this issue. (My inclusion of the link was more just about giving appropriate credit, fwiw.) @chrisphin @C_Chell adding to that, the /s/ links works as any URL shortener with a lot of tracking elements built-in. This includes Reddit tracking who created the link and how "successful" it is, tracking user accounts following the links and when, etc, etc. Just use the regular URL. @chrisphin @glennf @chrisphin As someone who used 80 columns on a 12" black and white TV as a kid, I welcome ways of fitting lots of text on lower resolution displays.
 @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf @drj This seems relevant to your interests. @chrisphin ๐ฆจ oh yea this font made us realize our tv had pixels in BGR format instead of RGB, so it just didn't work  @chrisphin @elliotjaystocks @glennf Wow, this is one of the neatest hacks I've seen for a long time. Related to this, I recall similar hack was used to smooth out fonts in TFT screens.  @chrisphin Of course this is tied to the color geometry of the display -- so it might work well on something like a portable console with well-defined hardware, like a Game Boy Advance or whatever the kids play these days.   @KnightNZ Works on TFTs! (At least ones with a specific arrangement of RGB subpixels.)  @chrisphin I still remember my grandma old tv had the RGB disposed in a triangular pattern, would not work in there ( I mean like in an "asterism" glyph ) . @gilesgoat Yeah, lots of different subpixel arrangements (even just ordering) where this wouldnโt work, but a very cool concept!  @chrisphin Doesn't work on all screens though. I have 2 screens here, it works with one (but not exactly t he same way) and not with the other (because colors are positioned diagonally, apparently) @elliotjaystocks Sorry for the noise! I didnโt expect it to take off like it did. Did edit you and @glennf out of the post eventually so it slowed the replies! (But if youโre interested, some people did add some interesting information in reply, so worth a dig. Obviously more a technical curiosity than a practical option, but fascinating, I think!) @chrisphin how do you count the mandatory separating pixel between two digits ? to consider it usable, I think one must count two pixels wide @chrisphin @bleeptrack Something for your next CCC presentation? @artelse @chrisphin ooh! I think @blinry and I mentioned that in one of our operation mindfuck talks ๐ค @bleeptrack @artelse Someone replied with a load of detail about how SEGA systems used to do this. Fascinating! |
@chrisphin @aral @elliotjaystocks @glennf Are pixels being exploited by this typography? Inquiring mindsโฆ