: Smallest readable printed font size for Calibri on my inkjet printer? What would be the smallest font in Microsoft Word that when printed on an A4 size paper would still be readable? By readable,

@Angela777

TERMINAL font

SIZE 6 (for LOWER case letters)

SIZE 5 (for UPPER case letters)

that's most likely what everyone's looking for...

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@Ravi4787994

Going on the assumption that readability has been tossed in the can and we're focusing on "can I make that character out or not" ...

Caps are more open, "plug-resistant" glyphs. That is, a capital glyph is made up of larger shapes that can be reduced more dramatically. This can make for big savings in line height (thus, vertical space). I mention line height because the average character width goes up. At the same time, your minimum font size gets smaller too so you can make up some if not all of that difference.

Bottom line: In raw "can I make it out" terms, all-caps Calibri at 5pt will be fine. The caps will also allow you to go down to 6 or 7pt leading. No one but lawyers and bored elderly folks with magnifying glasses will ever read it, but the characters will technically render.

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@Pierce403

It depends on what DPI you use for the print. With a high resolution, ie. high DPI, you can print very small sizes.

Human eyes cannot read much details beyond 300 DPI so for readability there is little point of using higher DPIs than that. Higher resolutions above 300 DPI are typically used for technical reasons such to overcome ink-bleeding (or if I may, for marketing gimmick in consumer printers).

If you still want to print very small letters a very high resolution is needed. It won't be readable to most people, but it's possible to do.

Just for the sake of process:

1 point of a font is defined as 1/72 of an inch. If you want to print a font in 5 points that will obviosuly be 5/72 of an inch. So to not have those raster-points merge all together you will need a resolution twice that size as a minimum, meaning 144 DPI.

Will it be readable? In the real-world probably not, ref. ink-bleeding. So here you need to double the resolution again and you end up at ~300 DPI. If your font is more than basic simple sans-serif you will again run into problems with ink and rendition of the details of the font so again you need to double the DPI to about 600 DPI. You can see where this is going.

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