What's the finest readily-available way to write on paper?

Question

I'm trying to make the smallest legible lettering I can - miniature writing on normal paper or something thinner.

This is in the context of craft with kids, so I'd like something affordable, also not too complicated. We'd like to make Lego-scale books (menus), though as that's around 1:40, clearly we're not going to get normal type sizes. Colours would be a significant bonus.

The best I've done so far is with a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil (the finest I have to hand) and very light pressure - that gets me down to letters 1 mm high and 0.5 mm wide, limited by the stroke width as much as my skill. H- and F-grade pencils are similar even if sharpened with a scalpel. I've tried rubbing the pencil to a sharp point but that didn't help much. You wouldn't fit many words on a page of say 10 mm high.

I doubt my skill is up to single-hair painting, but can't think of anywhere in between. And yes, inkjet-printing is another option; we'll probably do some of that too.

Answer 1

The smallest pen I have personally found is a 0.03 mm size pen; while it does leave a very small line, the tip is quite fragile and tends to break more often than my larger pens (including the 0.05, the next size up). It requires a delicate touch; while you would probably be fine with it, I wouldn't recommend handing it to kids, who haven't always developed the motor skills to be gentle with the pen.

The 0.03 size is also fairly uncommon; typically, the smallest pen tips you'll find will be either 0.05 or 0.1. You can see a comparison of the line sizes in this sample image from JetPens, found in their product listings for Copic Multiliners, one of the brands that does carry this size of pen; Marvy and Deleter also sell a pen in this size. The image below is an actual sample of the pens, on an undisclosed lettering paper, to show comparative line weight and bleed between sizes.

Answer 2

You mention the inkjet printing option. I'll focus on that. In a nutshell, you'll be disappointed, although it might be an option if you lack the skill and instruments to do miniature printing by hand.

Inkjet printers can lay down microscopic droplets of ink at very high DPI, but you don't really have control at that level. They are designed to reproduce detail and color accurately down to the level you can readily see at a normal viewing distance. Below that scale, the ink droplets are used to create optical illusions to simulate what you think is there. The printer driver and printer electronics control all of that detail to create an approximation of what you ask it to print.

The tiny droplets are small enough to simulate smooth curves. If you're printing in color, a large mass of mixed-color droplets is used to approximate the actual color from primary colors. Color inaccuracies are compensated by making adjacent areas off-color. At the scale of the individual droplets, droplet positioning is pretty imprecise, and some randomness is thrown in to avoid creating neat geometric patterns that your eye could detect as artifacts.

To illustrate the limitations, I created a little text using a simple font at a size of 3 pt, and printed it on regular printer paper. Here is an enlargement (actual size is about 1 mm high:

At this scale, the ink wicking is significant relative to the size of the characters (although you could do better than this using photo paper). You can see the "wiskers" and bleeding into the small voids within the characters. You can see the aggregation of ink dots creating the character lines. At this size, it's difficult for the printer to accurately reproduce the character geometry. With normal 10 or 12 pt text, the characters would be large enough that these issues wouldn't be noticeable.

With good font selection and photo paper, you could create readable text at 3 pt., but you might want to use a magnifying glass to read it if you don't have perfect vision. It gets dicey as you go to smaller point sizes than that.

One benefit of inkjet over manual lettering is that it would be much faster. Miniature writing by hand is something done slowly and carefully under a magnifier. Also, you wouldn't risk spending a lot of time creating the miniature text and then accidentally ruin it with a stray mark. With its limitations on readability, it still might be perfectly adequate if the objective is just to create the appearance of text and readability isn't critical.

Answer 3

Maybe it wasn't the size of your pencil that limited you, but the hardness of the lead. Most mechanical pencil leads come in HB. The hardest pencil leads tend to be something like "9H", although the names differ between brands.

Using a much harder pencil allows you to write much finer lines, but you have to press the lead harder into the paper. You can buy individual pencils of different hardnesses in stationary or craft shops. It doesn't even have to be a mechanical pencil. You can create a nice sharp tip on a regular pencil if the lead is hard enough.

I remenber seeing someone write a long sentence on the back of a post stamp in TV, but I cannot find it anywehre on Youtube. He used regular lead pencils sharpened to a very fine point and switched pencils after a few words (to have a fresh tip).

Answer 4

Use a film camera

Design the text in large size on computer, and invert the colors in the image. It should have white text on black background now, and all colors should be inverted also.

Use an old film camera to take a photo of this, and get the film developed. It will take a week or so, but usually does not cost much. You don't need any prints, just the film negative. You can even get the chemicals for black and white home development for about 20 dollars.

The height of the whole photo on film will be 24 mm. The typical resolution of camera film is about 50 lines per mm, which means that you should be able to get sharp text that is 0.1 mm high or even smaller.

You can then cut out pieces of the film negative and glue them like any plastic.

Answer 5

I watched someone write multiple lines of text on a pebble that was coated with clear nail polish by using a single hair from an artist's brush dipped in India ink. I think the hair was from a watercolor brush. The writing was nearly microscopic but perfectly legible. The hair was retained by the split end of a dowel, which was held like a pencil.

Answer 6

I accidentally laser-printed (on a fairly decent modern laser printer) a PDF much smaller than I mean to. This was on normal office paper, and those are mm tick marks on the ruler. Unlike inkjet it doesn't bleed, but it's clearly resolution-limited, and under the microscope I can see the toner follows the tooth of the paper a bit

This only worked for black. I didn't have coloured text as small, but the larger blue I did have was a fairly clear cyan with scattered dots of magenta.

(click for higher resolution)

Answer 7

Try to 3D print the whole book, including the letters.

Or let the kids draw on your current books. Sometimes they have finer motor skills.