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by ImmaPooh
See also Pixel4x5 by ImmaPooh.

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    Created on 8th November 2016. Last edited on 2nd March 2018.
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14 Comments

Copied from https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/819937/bin2x2grid_safe

• Good job {e.g. a handful of interesting symbols; a uniform font type color; a blocky and homogeneous 3x3 grid; a daring underscore symbol; a coherent encasing set of symbols; and above all, a full basic Ascii set}.

• Difficult trials {e.g. four 3-x-height and four baseline hacks in your lowercase, which is incoherent; three split glyphs, which can be invalid sooner or later; monospaced-only design, wich is not quite portable; 4-dot- vs 3-dot-wide retained convention, which is not designer-friendly; uppercase and symbols alike numerics, which is ambiguous and not favorable to a less artistic context like coding or gaming; one 4-dot-tall and possibly duplicated glyphs in the non-basic-Ascii range, which is not an issue in the strict basic Ascii that I stick with myself}.

• Thank you, I'll try to remember your own preferences (before a possible series of polls in the future), and the choices you shared with the other related type designers (before this kind of font can be popularized, one day…).

• Too bad my 3x3 .xlsb documentation (and its enclosed converters) is still unpublished. {You would see how many alternate glyphs you still have to improve even more your -young- font, e.g. as variable width and with smaller glyphs… my (sort of) bottom line and piece of advice: try to insulate the various parts in our basic Ascii, next check the 'robustness' of your font in different contexts, again and again (and expect to spend hours to years in the fine-tuning processes and alternate fonts, e.g. I had to provide a few sets of 3x3 numerics to please the neophyte or aesthetic preferences, in the both width layout and with no duplicate in each font of course).

• The first difficulty was to get zero duplicate in 3x3 in a basic Ascii font: you passed this pitfall, I see quickly, but your font does not validate as variable width, then you compel subsequently your users to use a software (where a decent 'micro' font should be reminded by the humans without too many puzzles). The second issue is obviously the legibility, and yours is quite average -and common- at this size (mainly because of too many oddities in the lowercase i.m.o.), knowing that my own 3x3 -unpublished- designs are not perfect at all either, though more coherent, hopefully.}

See you (more info on the FS page linked above).

Comment by dpla 19th april 2017

@dpla: The 4-dot tall character is just for line spacing.

Comment by ImmaPooh 15th may 2017

Yes, but this adds a flaw in the minimalist concept (a 3x3 is supposed to be compact/thrifty vertically too)… Let's say it's more legible as is.

Comment by dpla 15th may 2017

All right, I needed to install "Pixel4x4" to get the issue: the extra line spacing shows only in the online previewer, while the font displays correctly in e.g. Notepad. OK: 3x3 glyphs in a 4x4 layout.

{I just can't get hold on the very last 3x4 character -what is this 'apostrophe'?-… the latter was enough deceptive to make me hastily post my supposition, since we cannot check accurately online, I assume.}

Comment by dpla 20th may 2017

@my last comment: the character was Á.

Usually, my baseline is a true baseline.

(the bottom is actually at the baseline)

Comment by ImmaPooh 21st may 2017

OK: "À" (with grave accent)… a junk glyph (since it looks like "'" but is raised/flawed), or added to hack the automatic line height? Anyway, the baseline is -too- tricky in the current fontstructor… {We cannot set it manually, can we? I mean, all the glyphs need to be moved by hand to add an extra line height (>1px), which spoils the meaning of 'baseline'… if it's supposed to be normal (no official help), it looks disorganized and may discourage me to add more pixel fonts with this -otherwise straightforward and precise- tool.}

Comment by dpla 21st may 2017

Added À for hacking the baseline. I will make a version w/o it, though.

Comment by ImmaPooh 3rd july 2017

@ my last comment: Actually, I'll update this one.

Comment by ImmaPooh 5th july 2017

Done. Also, Updated some glyphs.

EDIT: NO LONGER FIXED-WIDTH!

EDIT 2: Updating the lowercase M.

EDIT 3: Done.

EDIT 4: Compressed some more characters.

EDIT 5: The lowercase i no longer has its dot.

Comment by ImmaPooh 5th july 2017

I almost missed your update (thank you Dmitriy Sychiov (Sychoff) for the link)… [Members can always contact me via private messages, when I am elsewhere for too long.]

---

THANK YOU, ImmaPooh! I download immediately, next update my archive (which goal is a future comparison with my large 'family' of small fonts, when the matrices match more or less, and it's definitively 3x3 in your case).

Sorry if I cannot review your latest changes (I'd need to keep and install both versions, investigate more than I can afford; instead, I replace the files, except for special occasions, of historical importance). About your message above, all the same:

• LC "M": logical;

• I cannot say which ones you compressed even more: but it's always a good idea, esp. when the general shape is square (not a vertical rectangle) and slows down the readability (that's why unserifed glyphs work fine at this pixel scale too, provided they are not duplicates, of course);

• hacked baseline: glad to read you confess this trick (actually, as I remember, the extra line height can be added below [my preference], above, even in both places in the fontstructor, which is not quite serious, though preserves some freedom of pixel design);

• undotted "i": abnormal (in typography - 2 code points cannot be mixed), yet a necessity as 3x3 (or you get a colon, even ambiguous characters);

• Yeah, fixed width is bad, I mean (do I repeat myself? senility then…): proportional into monospaced is always OK, not the contrary; besides what is the point of shrinking? more space, for sure! Therefore, in our script (base on horizontal lines), it is only made on the width (the height just follows this rule, without too much wasted surface, thus a decent ratio, that's why one doesn't often design e.g. a 3x16 font - all right, this place is full of such daring creators, 'just for the fun of it' [being unreadable, I'd say]).

I won't go in detail about your selection of glyphs, since this could influence your mapping, and reveal a lot about my own choices (not necessarily the best ones, but they work at the scale of this matrix, even in thousands of others, with rare exceptions that required alternate fonts, e.g. using the serifed and dotless lowercase "i" where "1" would get the same 3x3 binary…).

Enough comment?

Comment by dpla 4th august 2017

oops

"x" and "ii" are duplicates

Comment by ImmaPooh 31st august 2017

Yes, dupes occur in proportional style… So a few tips:

• "x": think more '2 x-height';

• "m" & "n": ditto, as a pair…

Keep up the effort (or just wait for the release of my main project).

Comment by dpla 2nd october 2017

There's now a serif on the LC i.

Comment by ImmaPooh 16th february 2018

Well, it's a valid solution (agains the related dupe) in monospace, so I download it again :-)

Comment by dpla 21st february 2018

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