Pixlet offers a couple of different fonts for rendering text. Which
one to use depends on the information being presented and the amount
of space available when rendering. Pixlet's Text Widget attempts to
draw the font on the baseline, i.e. offset upwards by the font's
descent. And if that sentence made no sense to you, read then next
section. =)
Our most important Unicode block is Basic Latin (a.k.a. ASCII). We also need at least the Latin-1 Supplement block (a.k.a. ISO 8859, "Latin-1") to be able to render symbols like Ñ, Ä and Ö. These matter a lot when displaying names of people, locations, etc.
The definitions in this graphic are helpful:
In addition to these, a glyph's advance is the distance between its "origin point", i.e. the leftmost point of the baseline, and the following glyph.
A cap height of 6 and a descent of 1 is sufficient to fit both upper and lower case A-Z, as well as the most common special characters. From fiddling with fonts a bit, this seems to be the minimum.
To cover Latin-1 Supplement, we need more space. At least one additional pixel in the ascent for characters with diacritics to be legible.
Note that all of these are free or public domain fonts created by others. Attribution is given for each below.
A modified version of 5x8. This font has variable advance (i.e. it's not mono-spaced) and slightly tweaked glyphs for improved legibility. All digits are monospace with advance 5.
Like 5x8, this covers Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement, plus some other latin glyphs.
All digits in tb-8 are monospaced 5x6, so rendering them with a baseline offset of -1 and a height of 6 is perfectly fine and renders the full glyphs without cropping.
Common numerical symbols ('+', '-', '/', '*', '=', '%', '.') also fit in height 6 with offset -1. These are however all variable-width. Note that ',' has descent 1 and won't fit in this case.
Currency symbols require full height in the general case, but euro sign '€' and dollar sign '$' have no descent and fit in 7 pixels.
- Advance: 2-6
- Height: 8
- Cap height: 6
- Ascent: 7
- Descent: 1
By Jørgen Ibsen
Covers Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement, but nothing beyond that. 256 code points.
- Advance: 6
- Height: 10
- Cap height: 6
- Ascent: 8
- Descent: 2
By Markus Kuhn.
Covers Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, a ton of other Latin code blocks. 1426 code points in total.
- Advance: 5
- Height: 8
- Cap height: 6
- Ascent: 7
- Descent: 1
By Markus Kuhn.
Covers Basic Latin, Latin1- Supplement, and a bazillion other glyphs, including the runic code block. 4121 code points in total.
- Advance: 6
- Height: 13
- Cap height: 9
- Ascent: 11
- Descent: 2
By Markus Kuhn.
Covers Basic Latin, Latin1- Supplement, and a bazillion other glyphs, including the runic code block. 4121 code points in total.
- Advance: 10
- Height: 20
- Cap height: 13
- Ascent: 16
- Descent: 4
A very tiny, monospace, bitmap font. It's a 4x6 font with 3x5 usable pixels. This font is great for a really tiny font that also supports upper and lower cased characters.
- Advance: 4
- Height: 6
- Cap height: 4
- Ascent: 5
- Descent: 1
This font is a true 3x5 font which only occupies 5 pixels on a display. Check out the 4x5 version if you have the width to spare.
- Advance: 4
- Height: 5
- Cap height: 4
- Ascent: 5
- Descent: 0
This font is a true 4x5 font which only occupies 5 pixels on a display. Check out the 3x5 version if you are also constrained on width.
- Advance: 5
- Height: 5
- Cap height: 4
- Ascent: 5
- Descent: 0