Are there any standard monochrome low resolution resolutions?

For rendering images you may want to look at ordered dithering, based on a paper by Bryce Bayer (my father).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering

At higher resolutions there are better methods, so this is now ancient technology. You might recognize this dither pattern from the graphics on old DEC computer boxes...

OpenBSD's default console font Spleen has a 5x8 version which, which is fairly legible while still looking nice:

https://github.com/fcambus/spleen

Any smaller than that and you're getting into ugly territory.

For very low resolution pixel fonts, refer to the answers at https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/91478/a-fo...

This is mostly a chip datasheet, but it describes a widespread set of glyphs used for cheap monochrome alphanumeric displays.

https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/LCD/HD44780.pdf

I had to look this up once, in search of "flat" and "natural" symbols for music. Turns out I had to create my own.

The HP48 calculator had a 131x64 display, and there was a bunch of third party software that wanted to cram lots on the screen, and so there were a lot of third party fonts [1]. You would have to figure out how to decode the file format though.

[1] https://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/utils/fonts/

You want 1-bit pixel art. A quick search for that yielded a nice trove of assets meant for lo-fi games; maybe you can adapt some of them?

https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-1-bit

I can’t help about the displays but must mention that I had a hard time understanding the subject line you posted. You might rewrite it to something like: “Are there any monochrome, low resolution displays?”

Many years ago there was a VT-100 terminal program called VT-10-Squared for the Atari 8 bit computers that managed to produce legible characters that were only 3 pixels wide.

IIRC, it had both upper and lower case, as well as the special VT-100 graphics characters. It was definitely usable, if somewhat headache-inducing when used to consume many screens of text.

It worked by drawing the characters in "high resolution" graphics mode (320x192! Woohoo!) so you could use mainframe software on the Atari, which normally only supported 40 columns of text.

Looks like the software is still hanging around the various Atari archives... it might be worth extracting the font, if licensing permits.

Generally anything low res is hand-designed on a pixel by pixel basis (whether monochrome or limited colours). For fonts the lowest legible is 5x8 (depending of your definition of 'legible', e.g. the alphabet as printed on a seven-segment display).

You could look back at early graphics fonts/icons, e.g. early X11 or after that Mac and Windows for inspiration. Also graphics LCD displays (e.g. one or two lines of 16 chars) and then there's the BBC Microbit with its 5x5 display - lots of creative stuff there, the stock demo it comes with does text and graphics (and the code is online).

This project seems to imply DejaVu Sans can be used on a 5-pixel-height display, although that's based on a very surface-level skim of the repo: https://github.com/rnauber/ESPHomeMatrixLED

I'd suggest that your best bet in general would be to look at any projects using these kinds of LED dot matrix marquee displays. I was able to find a lot of arduino tutorials with a google search, there's probably relevant code with some of those. Good luck!

I used to entertain myself during math class designing tiny fonts for my HP48. And I have 0 design skill. The constraints are so tight if you want really tiny fonts at that level that there aren't that many options anyhow. It's fun and easy to just make some.

For stuff more in the 8 pixel range, there a ton of stuff. If you give a full 20 pixels to one line you can use almost any font you like.

You mean PC controllable?

There are lot's of displays available, but most of them are geared to electronics projects. You'll need at least an arduino or some such to drive it.

There are quite a few character-generator ROM images out there on the web from the early days of 'Home Computers', especially for the 'TV Typewriter' kits which had a 16 line, 64 char per line display. Most of those used (IIRC) an 8x8 character grid which included blank rows and columns to act as character-to-character and line-to-line separators.

Not free, but the best: https://www.ramtex.dk/

I don't know of any offhand, you might want to look for "pixel art" libraries.

pixel size is dependent on the display size