Tiny pixel fonts are a challenge. With double-width pixels, they’re a nightmare.

Image: Moonbench

My first computer suffered an economy found in early 8-bit machines with limited video memory: if you wanted lots of colors, you got less pixels, and a rational way to do that with the hardware back then was to make pixels twice as wide. This creates weird aesthetic constraints, not least when it comes to rendering text. Fonts would be b…