I've made a series of fonts for the PICO-8. Each font uses as few sprites and as little code as possible. An 'LS' version of a font uses Less Sprites at the expense of longer code.
TinyText: a lowercase font meant for use alongside the uppercase system font. Each character is just 3x4 pixels and aligns to the bottom of the system font, meaning lines of text are still 5 pixels tall and 3-pixel monospaced. The whole font uses just 5 sprites. Can fit 21 lines of text on-screen (the same as the system font).
TinyTextLS: the same font as TinyText but with just 4 sprites!
MiniText: a prettier lowercase font also meant for use alongside the uppercase system font. Character size varies and can hang below the writing line, meaning lines of text are now 7 pixels tall (but are still 3-pixel monospaced). The code is a bit longer, but the font still only uses 5 sprites. Can fit 16 lines of text on-screen.
MiniTextLS: the same font as MiniText but with just 3 sprites! [deprecated, see LRP's Mini]
LRP's Mini: the same font as MiniText but packed into just 2 sprites by LRP!! It also uses less code than MiniTextLS, so it's all-round better - use this one instead of MiniTextLS! Find it in the comments.
These fonts come with 3 text rendering functions, plus there's the system print, so we have:
3Text: this is a standalone font that replaces the system font for printing. Every character is just 3x3 pixels and the code is very short, but it uses 10 sprites and is the hardest one to read. Can fit 32 lines of text on-screen.
License:
Pictures:
Here's the MiniText font rendered, in MiniText 1.1 and in MiniTextLS:
And here's the 3Text font rendered and in 3Text (I haven't been able to do 3TextLS because of what seems to be a PICO-8 string parser error):