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ycombiredd 2 hours ago [-]
So at first I misunderstood your tool, thinking it was like a tool I made a little over a year ago that creates new fonts from existing font glyph paths, combining them in a couple of ways. It began as an ambigram generator (png image) using an arbitrary ttf or woff of your choosing and once I had that working, I realized that since I was just transforming vector paths, I could mix paths from multiple fonts, still focusing on ambigram generation.
Eventually, scope crept until it became an interesting and useful thing to be able to combine say, the top half of Arial with the bottom half of Times New Roman's letters (and combine with various boolean operations on the paths, with outlines, etc, and I assumed others would be as pleased with this ability as I was, so I documented some examples and shared it here and in a fontography subreddit.
To my surprise, it got essentially no interest when I posted here, and the response from the typography folks was basically negative with people somehow framing it as a piracy-adjacent thing, and not a fun thing to do, just mashing up vector paths to get interesting unique results. shrug
Seems like you and maybe some other participants in this discussion might actually appreciate this little tool and get some enjoyment and perhaps utility out of it, so I'll share it here.
https://github.com/scottvr/fambigen
There are examples in the README that show what it does in ambigram mode or "font compositor" mode. Enjoy!
paulhebert 2 hours ago [-]
This is cool! Thanks for sharing
mortenjorck 10 hours ago [-]
I have never felt quite so cacklingly nefarious as a designer as I did just now carefully adjusting vertical scale and offset so that the x-height and baseline of Papyrus optically match Comic Sans when mixed together.
I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.
I am still laughing after seeing Royal Ransom, and now there's this...
Thanks for lengthening my lifespan (if what they say about laughter is true), and for a great mood for the day.
And that's before even making any single font with the tool.
Obscurity4340 9 hours ago [-]
Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious
danielheath 7 hours ago [-]
Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.
mikestorrent 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah we need to see this
soperj 4 hours ago [-]
"The new avatar logo is bastardized papyrus in bold" does have a ring too it.
malfist 7 hours ago [-]
You should also subtly adjust the skew to throw kerning way off
krelas 9 hours ago [-]
If you want to make a designer have a nervous breakdown, upload a copy of Helvetica and make every second or third character be Arial.
FuriouslyAdrift 9 hours ago [-]
calm down, Satan
goodmythical 8 hours ago [-]
All S/E/R/I/F characters in a sans-serif font with the serif equivalent.
shagie 4 hours ago [-]
Ariel, don't swap glyphs ABCDFGHJKLMNOPQTUVWXYZabcdghjklmnopqtuvwxyz but every 1 glyph is Times Roman scaled to 120% ... https://imgur.com/a/xzv8zNh
Sharlin 10 hours ago [-]
Inspired by the sample text for "Nervous Sans": "Anal", an Arial with bad keming
sebmellen 9 hours ago [-]
Took me a moment.. hilarious
RandyOrion 32 minutes ago [-]
Hilarious. My first thought on these fonts is that similar clip art style text is frequently used in Persona 5. Now I know this is an active design choice.
P.S. I saw keming and my mind went blank for a little while.
tholman 3 hours ago [-]
Fun story, a good... (checks calendar, oh lord) 8+ years ago, I made a mis-kerned version of helvetica (smelvetica i called it [1]) as a joke, and eventually had the lawyers push on me
> we ask that you stop promoting ‘Smelvetica’ and making the font software available to everybody. Next time, just let us know if you have more ideas on how to modernize our classics, we are always open for creative input.
I thought you could put in natural language and generate a font. But you can’t. So I made one where you can: https://fonts.buttface.rocks/
dvh 11 hours ago [-]
For extra fun, you can make font that are the same as original but then you add ligature for some words and you make ligature using the same font but spelling different word. For example "red" ligature will be "green".
someonebaggy 11 hours ago [-]
Do this on a document to determine who is copy-pasting or reading it with AI.
smeehee 9 hours ago [-]
Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.
7 hours ago [-]
amenghra 9 hours ago [-]
Do this as a captcha ;)
altairprime 10 hours ago [-]
Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.
kstrauser 9 hours ago [-]
That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.
6thbit 9 hours ago [-]
Huh, didn't know the font could control variations over nth glyhph!
Could one make in theory a regular monospaced font to just render glyphs past 80 chars of a line as bad as possible?
I have been looking for this for a very long time without knowing I have been looking for it. Royal Ransom especially is a masterpiece, I will be writing all of my work emails in these fonts from now on. Thank you. (I work for myself btw)
dyingkneepad 10 hours ago [-]
Royal Ransom Note just downloaded! It will be great to never have to cut magazines again!
sasaf5 2 hours ago [-]
Oh, and all the glueing it takes... I hate that part.
philjohn 10 hours ago [-]
temu sans is beautifully on point
Sharlin 10 hours ago [-]
More subtle keming adjustments so that the font looks just slightly "off" would be great too.
thenthenthen 42 minutes ago [-]
Love the Temu variation. You can just use a ‘Chinese’ font and type roman text as well. Most of these fonts use a fixed width for Chinese glyphs, as wel as for the western characters, so i,l,f etc all have ‘extra’ white space around them, resulting in the ‘Temu’ effect, it is absolutely everywhere here in China.
and I don't know who to report it to. I guess it's owned by Microsoft so also not surprised.
ZeWaka 11 hours ago [-]
This is beautiful. I think I'll have to use this for a game.
cluckindan 6 hours ago [-]
Beware of licensing.
demaga 10 hours ago [-]
I was thinking the same. Seems like a perfect fit for an 'escape simulator' room.
lelanthran 11 hours ago [-]
I have to admit, I spent way more time on this than required (giggling madly at my creations)
hypfer 7 hours ago [-]
I've been recently thinking about custom fonts and ligatures to create a captcha mechanism that is easy to solve for humans but confuses LLMs.
Something like a dynamically generated font where some letters look different, and you have to count details or write down a word or [idea not yet fleshed out].
Won't stop someone dedicated, of course, but nothing will.
ctoth 5 hours ago [-]
I use a screen reader. Please do not do this.
m463 6 hours ago [-]
Not much different from lots of the optional font packages you can install on linux...
:)
EDIT: I think larabie fonts? I do like pupcat though.
NietzscheanNull 10 hours ago [-]
This is great!
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
Something went wrong: Out of bounds memory access (evaluating '_PyRun_SimpleString(r)')
furyofantares 6 hours ago [-]
Nice! It even supports COLR and SVG fonts, both of which I have options for when making a variant of my Keldritch font (https://kellydornhaus.com/keldritch/)
flockonus 6 hours ago [-]
Such a cool idea, breath in new live to old fonts!
I wonder what's the footprint and overall efficiency of making a new font vs. combining old ones on client side (typically JS)?
dzulp0d 3 hours ago [-]
Love it. Also, why do shady electronic manuals look like that?
abdusco 7 hours ago [-]
I kinda dig Impacter. It looks quite stylish IMO.
thecaio 9 hours ago [-]
Temu Sans cracked me up
omegadynamics 3 hours ago [-]
this is just Grotesk
morbusfonticuli 9 hours ago [-]
I love it! Every click on the title will also change its bastard font :-)
epiccoleman 11 hours ago [-]
Love this, I had a lot of fun and more than a few laughs messing around with it.
htrp 10 hours ago [-]
This looks like the cut out magazine ransom letters you see in every movie.
Sharlin 10 hours ago [-]
Scroll down, they have an explicit example (with more fonts mixed in)
patriciobcs 7 hours ago [-]
cool app, maybe make the logo at the bottom clickable so is easier to see the main page, also very cool.
xnx 11 hours ago [-]
Nice logo interaction too!
vpribish 1 hours ago [-]
you earned my upvote simple with the name "Times New Bastard". goddamn
repple 3 hours ago [-]
love it! Temu Sans.. hahaha
jrochkind1 11 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I love-hate it.
DonHopkins 5 hours ago [-]
I wish I could make Dijkstra Dingbats.
zf00002 8 hours ago [-]
Really fun op!
0gs 7 hours ago [-]
if people want to play with font generation in a non joke -- and frankly way LESS impressive -- manner, i made likeface.net too. it's a little buggy. but it's cheap and it's generous with redraws
lathoa 8 hours ago [-]
I like it
logicallee 9 hours ago [-]
Nice, I like it. The fonts are very interesting and captivating.
aanet 9 hours ago [-]
My eyes!!!
khalic 10 hours ago [-]
Seeing the results makes me unreasonably angry… nice job :D
busymom0 10 hours ago [-]
Bookmarked for future use!
mock-possum 23 hours ago [-]
Whoa this is really cool. Wish I had an excuse to use it for something… hmmm.
hmartin 11 hours ago [-]
Also clicking the logo is really fun!
peter_d_sherman 8 hours ago [-]
This is interesting -- not from the perspective of different fonts (although that's interesting too!), but from the perspective of it's a web page that can apparently render fonts on the fly...
That means that it's probably using some library in JavaScript or WASM to implement that.
If that's the case, then I'm thinking, you know, that functionality, that is, font rendering on demand could, in theory, be placed into a CloudFlare Worker (or other Serverless service, i.e. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, OCI Funcions, IBM Cloud Code Engine, Alibaba Function Compute, etc., etc.)...
That could be useful for a variety of applications... including (but not limited to!) word processors, typesetting software, homemade browsers, online games, heck, really anything where custom fonts are needed...
There could be two distinct benefits with this, let's call it a "FaaS" (Fonts as a Service!) idea:
1) No need to bundle/ship/include a font rendering engine with software that needs one.
2) Extra layer of security -- Local font rendering software is typically Turing-Complete, and as such, the local font renderer could potentially run viruses and other unwanted programs. I.e., local font rendering is a security risk. By hermetically sealing that code into serverless function, offsite of the local machine and having that serverless function send only fully rendered font data one way, the attack surface of the font rendering engine is effectively removed from any local PC.
This being said, the disadvantage is that it couldn't be used if the Internet or server or cloud provider is down for any reason.
Graphical font data, once created and downloaded, could however be cached by clients for offline situations / offline usage / offline work.
So, there are some interesting ideas here...
phren0logy 10 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I hate it.
shagie 4 hours ago [-]
Courier mixed with courier, but every 11th glyph is scaled 80% vertically (retains 100% horizontal). Monospace remains, but things are off.
electric_mayhem 10 hours ago [-]
This is absolutely diabolical and should not be put into the hands of humanity.
What have you unleashed? Hey, look guys we got the next Oppenheimer over here.
Eventually, scope crept until it became an interesting and useful thing to be able to combine say, the top half of Arial with the bottom half of Times New Roman's letters (and combine with various boolean operations on the paths, with outlines, etc, and I assumed others would be as pleased with this ability as I was, so I documented some examples and shared it here and in a fontography subreddit.
To my surprise, it got essentially no interest when I posted here, and the response from the typography folks was basically negative with people somehow framing it as a piracy-adjacent thing, and not a fun thing to do, just mashing up vector paths to get interesting unique results. shrug
Seems like you and maybe some other participants in this discussion might actually appreciate this little tool and get some enjoyment and perhaps utility out of it, so I'll share it here. https://github.com/scottvr/fambigen
There are examples in the README that show what it does in ambigram mode or "font compositor" mode. Enjoy!
I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.
It will show up as "Papyrus and Comic Sans MS Bastard".
Now why you want this is the real question.
Apparently there's a sequel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0
Thanks for lengthening my lifespan (if what they say about laughter is true), and for a great mood for the day.
And that's before even making any single font with the tool.
P.S. I saw keming and my mind went blank for a little while.
> we ask that you stop promoting ‘Smelvetica’ and making the font software available to everybody. Next time, just let us know if you have more ideas on how to modernize our classics, we are always open for creative input.
- [1](https://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/)
Could one make in theory a regular monospaced font to just render glyphs past 80 chars of a line as bad as possible?
I saw what you did there
This is truly the YTP of fonts.
https://imgur.com/a/FCmzWNa
and I don't know who to report it to. I guess it's owned by Microsoft so also not surprised.
Something like a dynamically generated font where some letters look different, and you have to count details or write down a word or [idea not yet fleshed out].
Won't stop someone dedicated, of course, but nothing will.
:)
EDIT: I think larabie fonts? I do like pupcat though.
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
I wonder what's the footprint and overall efficiency of making a new font vs. combining old ones on client side (typically JS)?
That means that it's probably using some library in JavaScript or WASM to implement that.
If that's the case, then I'm thinking, you know, that functionality, that is, font rendering on demand could, in theory, be placed into a CloudFlare Worker (or other Serverless service, i.e. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, OCI Funcions, IBM Cloud Code Engine, Alibaba Function Compute, etc., etc.)...
That could be useful for a variety of applications... including (but not limited to!) word processors, typesetting software, homemade browsers, online games, heck, really anything where custom fonts are needed...
There could be two distinct benefits with this, let's call it a "FaaS" (Fonts as a Service!) idea:
1) No need to bundle/ship/include a font rendering engine with software that needs one.
2) Extra layer of security -- Local font rendering software is typically Turing-Complete, and as such, the local font renderer could potentially run viruses and other unwanted programs. I.e., local font rendering is a security risk. By hermetically sealing that code into serverless function, offsite of the local machine and having that serverless function send only fully rendered font data one way, the attack surface of the font rendering engine is effectively removed from any local PC.
This being said, the disadvantage is that it couldn't be used if the Internet or server or cloud provider is down for any reason.
Graphical font data, once created and downloaded, could however be cached by clients for offline situations / offline usage / offline work.
So, there are some interesting ideas here...
What have you unleashed? Hey, look guys we got the next Oppenheimer over here.