If you have a hard time with text in Canvas, I hope this helps.
I regret not posting it before Canvas 2025, but hopefully it'll be useful for people playing it in 2026. All letters are 5 pixels tall, and most 3 pixels wide (some 4, a few 5). I've also included a few Cyrillic letters and the digits.
I tried to make it even smaller, but it gets really funky.
As an alternative, the 8-bit world has been doing this for a very .. long .. time.
Do you have some good examples of that? The more, the merrier - it might help people to get ideas.
There's hundreds, here's a few tiny ones:
Example of discussion on the topic:
I didn’t read the post and took longer than it should have to realize that the bottom half-ish are non-Roman. (Numbers are Arabic! So half!)
I… speak Russian tho (badly, non-fluently), so I should have known..
What is the character between <> and ¡?
You mean Ø? I accidentally inverted it, but it should be easy for people to flip it. Here's a full list of what I've tried to represent:
ABCDEFGHIJ LMNOPQRST UVXYZ!?.,"«» ØİKWYÐÞŁ БГДЖЗИЛПЦ ШЩЬЮЯФ 1234567890
I hate how Щ looks
If you don't mind having a few six pixels tall letters:
Ш (for reference), Щ, Ц (same problem as Щ), and У (it's weird to use Y in its place, but I kind of forgot to add it).
Of course, this will depend on space, plus personal style. I'm not claiming this is the only way to do things, it's just a viable "font" for people struggling with text in the canvas to use as starting point.
(I actually use a similar strategy with diacritics in the Latin alphabet. Specially ⟨Ç⟩.)
Counter argument: This is just one style and the canvas looks better with a mix.
Many of the letters can be made a pixel slimmer, can already make a huge difference to a final look.
Sometimes it also matters what letters you actually need.