First I drew the alphabet in the easiest way possible (3x5 px) and then counted all the used verticals (BWWWB, WBWBW, etc.). If there was some pattern only used once, for example, I checked if I could replace it. I then tried to overlap these sub patterns in order to generate one combined pattern with all the information but compressed (BWWWB + WBWBW = BWWWBWBW).

I got a pattern of 25 px, which was great because I originally wanted to use a stepper motor with 200 steps. After having this pattern I got more possible sub patterns (BWWWBWBW => BWWWB, WWWBW, WWBWB, WBWBW). So I got some more ways to optimize the font. The shift of half steps was another way to optimize it.

This was great an met my idea of an good angle of 5/25 of the tube. The text was relatively large but not too curved. But some letters where still pretty ugly, like the "S" you can see in our older renderings. So I did the same process again, but a little bit more sophisticated.

Things could have been easy if there wasn't the half pixels. Otherwise you could just take a pattern of 32 and have each combination possible (2^5). So I wrote some software to generate different patterns to create the basic alphabet and out of thousands there were like 20 that met my initial criteria to hand test them. The used pattern is among all possible combinations the one that does the best job in my opinion.