There are all kinds of fonts useful for different purposes. You wouldn’t want to write an epic poem in Comic Sans, but you’d probably want to make an attractive flyer for kids’ birthday parties.
What if you need to write something tiny? Say the size of a grain of sand? Or even smaller? When you need to include a lot of information in a bit of space, you’ll want to use the smallest 12-size font.
Its main advantage is that it’s so tiny. The smallest 12-size font ever made is excellent when you need to fit lots of information into a bit of space. Whether you need to identify the contents of your Petri dishes or your prescription pills, small fonts will help you get the job done. It’s also great for printing microchips or anything else that needs labels.
This article will talk more about small fonts and common questions about them!
What is the Smallest Font?
The smallest font is a script that goes down to a hard-to-see 0.06mm in size. It was developed by graphic designer Yuzo Koshiro and is called “Smallest Font Ever.” However, the smallest readable font in MS Word is 8 points. The best readable smallest fonts are Arial, Calibri, and Helvetica.
Yuzo Koshiro is a Japanese video game composer and designer. He began his career in 1985, producing music for various PC-8801 computer games, but he is best known for his work on the Streets of Rage and Shenmue series.
Koshiro was born in Tokyo, Japan, on December 12th, 1967. He is the son of composer Michio Koshiro, who composed music for such games as The Tower of Druaga. He studied classical piano and music theory with his father, who gave him a PC-8001 computer at age 14. He began composing music for games shortly after that.
His first major hit was the 1987 game The Revenge of Shinobi for Sega Genesis. Since then, he has worked on many popular games, including Shenmue (Sega Dreamcast), Actraiser (SNES), Beyond Oasis (Genesis), Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii), and Etrian Odyssey (DS).
He’s also known for inventing the smallest font ever. At 0.06 points, Koshiro’s small font is now the smallest font in the world.
The Japanese designer had been developing it for years, and even when his prototypes were successful, he still felt he could do better. He sought to create a font that would be “clear and beautiful” and small enough to be used in places with limited space.
With mobile technology and tablets’ growing popularity, Koshiro recognized this need and put his expertise to work. In an interview with The Washington Post, Koshiro said: “I wanted to create something small enough to fit on an iPhone screen without sacrificing readability.”
Are all 12-point fonts the same size?
The answer is no. It would be best to remember that not all 12-point fonts are the same size. If you look at a font’s label, it will often tell you how long one inch of text is in that font.
For example, if you have a font containing 20 characters in one inch, that is longer than a font with 50 characters. If you’re looking at two different fonts with names like “12-point Times New Roman” and “12-point Calibri”, the Times New Roman font will be larger than the Calibri font. This concerns their character widths—Times New Roman has more comprehensive characters than Calibri.
Despite the name, not all 12-point fonts are created; different typefaces define 12-point font sizes and determine font sizes.
A type designer chooses the font size based on what they think will look best. This can vary based on the font’s style—the designer might choose to make a 12-point font larger or smaller depending on how narrow or wide it is because the letter spacing can affect how tall it seems.
In addition, type designers can select how much white space each character occupies within the font. For example, one 12-point font might have a lot of space around each letter that appears within a word, while another might use up more of its allotted space with the actual letters themselves. In this way, it’s possible to have more than 100 characters in one line of text when using one 12-point font and fewer than 80 characters in another line using an equally sizeable 12-point font.
Finally, another variable to consider is the baseline size of each character—the line on which letters appear to rest—which can also be different among fonts. When you add all these variables together, it’s easy to see why there could be differences between fonts labeled as the same point size.
What is the smallest size 12 font?
Many people believe that Times New Roman is the smallest 12-point font, but this is not always true; Black, Impact, and Lucida Sans Unicode are smaller than Times New Roman; it all comes down to the spaces between the characters.
When you think of Times New Roman, what comes to mind?
Maybe it’s a book you read in college. Perhaps it’s the last memo you typed up for work. Maybe it’s a poster advertising a sale at your local deli. Whatever the case, it feels almost universal: Times New Roman is everywhere.
But do you know why? Is it because it’s the most accessible font to read? The most elegant font? The most legible font?
Many people think Times New Roman is the smallest 12-point font, but that doesn’t explain why many applications use it by default. It also doesn’t explain why many other fonts are more significant than TNR at the same point size. So, if TNR isn’t inherently small, what gives?
TNR was initially created in 1929 (and first used by a British newspaper called The Times) to be used at only one point size: 12 points. When it was designed, each character was designed to look best when printed at exactly 12 points—no more significant, no smaller. So when you use TNR at 12 points, each letter is as perfect as possible.
The font that looks like Times New Roman but smaller
To make text that resembles Times New Roman but is smaller, you can use the font “Times New Roman Italic.” The italicized version of the font causes it to appear slightly smaller than the regular version.
The Times New Roman italicized version is slightly different from its cousin, the regular version. It was initially designed for a typewriter, and when it was adapted for computers, the italicized version was modeled after how an actual typewriter does italics.
The italics feature for early typewriters was accomplished through a slanted platen roller and an oblique typebar that could be adjusted to allow the typebar to hit the page at an angle. The result was uneven and difficult to read; as a result, italicized versions of fonts were rarely used.
The Times New Roman Italic font imitates this typewritten italics look but with a slight subtlety that makes the words easier to read.
Is Times New Roman smaller than Calibri?
Yes, Times New Roman is smaller than Calibri. As a human being, this is something that you will have to learn to live with.
Times New Roman may look like a fancy new wine from New York State’s Finger Lakes region, but it’s not. It’s a font invented to make newspaper text easier. However, the developer of Calibri wanted to make it more readable online and on-screen, which meant making it less horizontally thick. The results can be subtle or striking, depending on your monitor or computer type!
So maybe Times New Roman looks better in print? We’re not judging. But when people view your work online, they’ll see Calibri instead.
What is the smallest professional font?
The smallest font you should use in professional writing is 10 points. You may want to go even larger to ensure your reader can read it easily.
When it comes to professional writing, you want to use a font size that is easy for everyone to read.
That means you should be using a font between 10 and 12 points. Using a serif font, like Times New Roman or Georgia, is also essential. These fonts have little “tails” on some of the letters, making them more accessible for people with older eyes to read.
If you’re writing, it’s best to keep your paragraphs short—no more than 100 words each. That makes it much easier for people to scan your text and still understand it.
What is the smallest sans-serif font?
The smallest sans serif font size is 6 points. Sans serif is a style of font. However, remember that as time passes, many will keep improving sans-serif fonts, including their size.
Sans serif fonts are a great way to show off your modern aesthetic while keeping things easy. Sans serifs are fonts without the extra strokes at the end of each letter, and they’re generally considered more stylish than their more formal cousins, serifs. These fonts tend to be easy to read on screens, making them an excellent choice for web-based applications or to ensure your message is readable from any distance.
Sans serif fonts include:
- Futura
- Helvetica
- Gotham
- Arial
Conclusion
Ultimately, no one knows how the “smallest font” is calculated. It’s possible that it just looks at how small the letter is compared to similar fonts and ignores whether or not the font “looks like a font” and if anyone recognizes what letters it’s supposed to be.
Learn more about authors in Nimblefreelancer's team biography page.