What is the minimal number of pixels to display every Unicode character? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: HAL-42b
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2016, 10:02:38 am
content: So with 7 segment display we can display every digit. With 16 segment we can display the basic Latin characters.So what would be the minimal number of segments (or pixels) to represent all Unicode characters?

author: matseng
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2016, 10:09:24 am
content: All 120 000 unicode characters?A 7-segment display can actually give a decent (less some) representation of the letters A-Z as well. So the definition of "display" is very ambiguous, can you "properly" display an Å or ? on a standard 5x7 matrix or not?

author: halexa
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2016, 10:19:12 am
content: Check this project were a GameBoy is used as a bookreader with chinese support. They use 16x16 pixel font but is say that there is CJK font supporting 11x11 pixels.http://www.mqp.com/fun/gb_chi.htmSine i think the CJK (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) charachter will be the limiter in a full unicode support and not charachters like Å, Ä, Ö ?, !. Due to hight, witdh and complexity of these charachters.

author: HAL-42b
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2016, 10:24:37 am
content: 7 seg creates ambiguity when displaying lL1I and things like bB86 so that's out.If we want unambiguaous representation of Uppercase and lowercase Latin even 14 segment is not quite enough. We kinda need 16 segments with split top and bottom bars. So let's say 16 seg is the minimum for basic Latin.5x7 is 35 segments and we still can't represent ascenders and descenders. If someone comes up with segmented display that can do that in less than 35 segment I would deem that superior.For the majority of European languages with ascenders and descenders we need 11×9 which is a whopping 99 segments.Now the question is can we display the entire Unicode including Arabic Chinese Thai etc. on 11x9.

author: HAL-42b
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2016, 10:32:32 am
content: Quote from: halexa on February 06, 2016, 10:19:12 amVery cool! Thanks for sharing.Nice thing that 16x16 is a nice round 256 pixels. Seems like they are able to store that in 3 bytes, though I'm not sure how different from Unicode their format is.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2016, 10:35:07 am
content: I think even the people behind the Unicode standard would have a hard time figuring out that, especially when you have characters + modifier characters and flags and emojis and all kinds of crap...Seehttp://eeemo.net/for some unicode fun, the forum here corrupts the text

author: HAL-42b
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2016, 11:41:30 am
content: Omg, Tom Scott is not just talking, he actually did it!!Moral of the story: NO EMOJIS!!!

author: Tomorokoshi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 08, 2016, 02:27:15 am
content: I've worked on embedded systems that used 12x12 for CJK unicode with good rendition. Going to 11x11 starts to force a lot of "hinting", that makes a lot of parallel lines turn into checkerboards. 16x16 should be quite clear. However, a lot depends on how the characters were rendered. I've encountered "free" fonts that were poor bitmap scaling of a larger rendered one, making it unusable. Be careful when rendering an outline font to a small bitmap font.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 08, 2016, 02:32:25 am
content: problem is that unicode also supports things like devanagari ...

author: HAL-42b
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 08, 2016, 10:01:09 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on February 08, 2016, 02:32:25 amDevangari, Cuneiform, Math operators like Square Root...

author: Jerome345
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: July 30, 2019, 05:49:43 am
content: Seehttp://zalgo.org/for some unicode fun, the forum here corrupts the text