Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/27/1px-wide-font.html
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6 Likes
What is this - a font for ants?
It needs to be at least 3px wide!
14 Likes
Designed for EULAs
28 Likes
It seems that different LCDs have different subpixel order - the font is readable on my old 1280x1024 LCD and completely unreadable on newer 40 inch 1920x1080 TV display.
8 Likes
And SEO.
(padding)
3 Likes
Is that something like CDM?
I don’t get it.
Search Engine Optimization. In this case, putting text on the page which only google can read.
1-pixel wide font, when you don’t really want anyone to read what you have written.
This is already a thing. It’s called a meta-tag.
2 Likes
I kinda forgot about search engine optimizing, not my field.
Continuously Developing Monologue.
Well yes but its an ongoing battle. Google knows that the user can’t see the meta tag.
4 Likes
I kinda miss the days when people would just dump piles of words into the footer of their site in the hopes of showing up in searches for those terms.
7 Likes
Yeah, I recall that some versions of Windows would ask for the subpixel order of your display when you turned on text smoothing. I haven’t seen it lately- the newer versions must get that info directly from the EDID.
3 Likes
Some newer monitors have the wrong default character set, just switch from ASCII to EBCDIC.
/snerk
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It’s likely your TV is resampling the original pixel data to fit its pixels, hence completely losing the original sub-pixel assignments.
3 Likes
Its probably still the standard on Lenovo Thinkpads.
3 Likes
[Scout said,] 'He’s gonna make me some invisible ink, and I’m gonna write to Dill in it.’
Francis asked what was the use of that.
‘Well, can’t you just see his face when he gets a letter from me with nothing in it? It’ll drive him nuts.’
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Definitely true if that’s not the native resolution. Also many TVs “accept” up to resolution X and then downsample to a lower physical resolution Y and assume (rightly) that few will notice.
2 Likes
It originally did that, and it was amazingly annoying, especially with CAD/CAM software. Luckily I’ve found that there’s “PC mode” enabled by changing name of one of TV’s inputs. It provides pixel-to-pixel mapping and significantly reduces latency. It was well hidden though 
7 Likes
I’ve looked at it. But if you squint your eyes, though…
… nope. That didn’t help.
4 Likes
Makes me wonder how this would work with font-smoothing technologies like ClearType.
1 Like
