2w ago

If you have a hard time with text in Canvas, I hope this helps.

I regret not posting it before Canvas 2025, but hopefully it'll be useful for people playing it in 2026. All letters are 5 pixels tall, and most 3 pixels wide (some 4, a few 5). I've also included a few Cyrillic letters and the digits.

I tried to make it even smaller, but it gets really funky.

16 comments

As an alternative, the 8-bit world has been doing this for a very .. long .. time.
- Do you have some good examples of that? The more, the merrier - it might help people to get ideas.
  
  There's hundreds, here's a few tiny ones:
  https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-51468.html
  https://web.archive.org/web/20250514212230/https://robey.lag.net/2010/01/23/tiny-monospace-font.html
  https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tiny-pixel-art-fonts/
  https://littlelimit.net/misaki.htm
  https://zserge.com/posts/tiny-font/
  Example of discussion on the topic:
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38799686#38802243
I didn’t read the post and took longer than it should have to realize that the bottom half-ish are non-Roman. (Numbers are Arabic! So half!)
I… speak Russian tho (badly, non-fluently), so I should have known..
I hate how Щ looks
- If you don't mind having a few six pixels tall letters:
  Ш (for reference), Щ, Ц (same problem as Щ), and У (it's weird to use Y in its place, but I kind of forgot to add it).
  Of course, this will depend on space, plus personal style. I'm not claiming this is the only way to do things, it's just a viable "font" for people struggling with text in the canvas to use as starting point.
  (I actually use a similar strategy with diacritics in the Latin alphabet. Specially ⟨Ç⟩.)
  
  I didn't notice Ц in the original post, I thought it's Ч
What is the character between <> and ¡?
- You mean Ø? I accidentally inverted it, but it should be easy for people to flip it. Here's a full list of what I've tried to represent:
  
  ABCDEFGHIJ LMNOPQRST UVXYZ!?.,"«» ØİKWYÐÞŁ БГДЖЗИЛПЦ ШЩЬЮЯФ 1234567890
Counter argument: This is just one style and the canvas looks better with a mix.
Many of the letters can be made a pixel slimmer, can already make a huge difference to a final look.
Sometimes it also matters what letters you actually need.
- Counter argument
  What argument are you exactly trying to "counter"?
  
  Its more of a warning for over relying on established systems.
  The more people experiment and make mistakes the more chance someone ends up with unique cool.

16 comments