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ycombiredd 9 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!
amoss 5 hours ago [-]
Your tool looks interesting but the readme file is very "wall of text" heavy and example light. In comparison the site for this tool shows exactly what it does. Perhaps that explains the difference in response. This is a classic case of the need for "show don't tell".
aargh_aargh 4 hours ago [-]
I'm just a regular Joe, no font expertise.
Sorry for the brutal honesty, just thought it might offer you an explanation of the difference in reaction.
OP's fonts look ugly, but intentionally and purposefully so, in a nails-on-chalkboard manner. In contrast, your example images just look plain ugly to me, can't imagine I would have any use for them.
Sorry again. I do understand the technological fascination with the process, just describing the aestheticity of the result here.
brettermeier 23 minutes ago [-]
Ugly I wouldn't say, it's liked glitched and noisy of some kind. Like any art it can be nice in some contexts.
paulhebert 9 hours ago [-]
This is cool! Thanks for sharing
mortenjorck 17 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.
Obscurity4340 16 hours ago [-]
Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious
danielheath 14 hours ago [-]
Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.
Inspired by the sample text for "Nervous Sans": "Anal", an Arial with bad keming
sebmellen 16 hours ago [-]
Took me a moment.. hilarious
tholman 10 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.
Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.
kstrauser 16 hours ago [-]
That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.
beAbU 5 hours ago [-]
All those presets are brilliantly named.
dvh 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
Do this on a document to determine who is copy-pasting or reading it with AI.
smeehee 15 hours ago [-]
Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.
servo_sausage 5 hours ago [-]
Accessibility should only ever be an addition, never a limit.
Semkas 1 hours ago [-]
Why should that be true?
servo_sausage 9 minutes ago [-]
Because proposing to limit something needs better justification than a fundamentally limited group can't use it.
It's an out of place performative moralism.
13 hours ago [-]
amenghra 16 hours ago [-]
Do this as a captcha ;)
TomMasz 46 minutes ago [-]
Even the font names are great. I can't think of use for any of these, but I'll keep them in mind should the need ever arise.
6thbit 16 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?
If you really wanted to let me be a sneaky bastard, you'd let me mix Helvetica with Arial every nth glyph.
(...and yes, I see I'm not the first to suggest this.)
dyingkneepad 17 hours ago [-]
Royal Ransom Note just downloaded! It will be great to never have to cut magazines again!
sasaf5 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, and all the glueing it takes... I hate that part.
jurf 5 hours ago [-]
Ah, yes, the central Europe experience. When I was a kid, all fonts looked like this, because almost none had ďíáčríťíčš, so text was full of fallback, out-of-place characters.
RandyOrion 7 hours 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.
dumbfounder 8 hours ago [-]
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/
philjohn 17 hours ago [-]
temu sans is beautifully on point
Sharlin 17 hours ago [-]
More subtle keming adjustments so that the font looks just slightly "off" would be great too.
thenthenthen 8 hours 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.
tuetuopay 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I always wondered why this was the case with latin text from CJK countries, as they use the same computers and software than the west, they should be able to do kerning right. I guess the original designers of those fonts are to blame for not making the latin characters "properly" monospace so that it still works.
I'm old enough to remember newspaper articles with kerning like that.
hackeryojo 10 hours ago [-]
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)
thewakalix 16 hours ago [-]
> Bastardica can make simple fonts feel a little, hmm, richer?
This is truly the YTP of fonts.
ZeWaka 17 hours ago [-]
This is beautiful. I think I'll have to use this for a game.
cluckindan 13 hours ago [-]
Beware of licensing.
demaga 17 hours ago [-]
I was thinking the same. Seems like a perfect fit for an 'escape simulator' room.
and I don't know who to report it to. I guess it's owned by Microsoft so also not surprised.
lelanthran 18 hours ago [-]
I have to admit, I spent way more time on this than required (giggling madly at my creations)
NietzscheanNull 17 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)')
schnebbau 4 hours ago [-]
Well today I learned corner-shape is a CSS property now.
hypfer 14 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 12 hours ago [-]
I use a screen reader. Please do not do this.
m463 13 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.
Rinkia 5 hours ago [-]
created the ultimate monster, papyrus + comic sans every 3 glyph
DylanMerigaud 5 hours ago [-]
Scope creep transformed your ambigram tool into something interesting.
furyofantares 13 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/)
Aduttya 9 hours ago [-]
Looking at current AI apps it's more of an integrater into current LLMs rather replacement?
flockonus 13 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)?
thecaio 16 hours ago [-]
Temu Sans cracked me up
micheljansen 5 hours ago [-]
Temu Sans is very on the nose.
abdusco 14 hours ago [-]
I kinda dig Impacter. It looks quite stylish IMO.
newtwentysix 7 hours ago [-]
Good one. My friends are having a fun time
dzulp0d 10 hours ago [-]
Love it. Also, why do shady electronic manuals look like that?
morbusfonticuli 16 hours ago [-]
I love it! Every click on the title will also change its bastard font :-)
epiccoleman 18 hours ago [-]
Love this, I had a lot of fun and more than a few laughs messing around with it.
htrp 17 hours ago [-]
This looks like the cut out magazine ransom letters you see in every movie.
Sharlin 17 hours ago [-]
Scroll down, they have an explicit example (with more fonts mixed in)
xnx 18 hours ago [-]
Nice logo interaction too!
jrochkind1 17 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I love-hate it.
cengizIO 5 hours ago [-]
This is exactly what I needed right now. Somehow, it made me cry out of disgust, anger, anguish, and acceptance all at once. Sneaky Bastard is now my default Obsidian font.
patriciobcs 14 hours ago [-]
cool app, maybe make the logo at the bottom clickable so is easier to see the main page, also very cool.
DonHopkins 12 hours ago [-]
I wish I could make Dijkstra Dingbats.
omegadynamics 10 hours ago [-]
this is just Grotesk
smugglerFlynn 3 hours ago [-]
This is seriously cool, Mitya
repple 10 hours ago [-]
love it! Temu Sans.. hahaha
zf00002 15 hours ago [-]
Really fun op!
phren0logy 17 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I hate it.
shagie 11 hours ago [-]
Courier mixed with courier, but every 11th glyph is scaled 80% vertically (retains 100% horizontal). Monospace remains, but things are off.
0gs 14 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 15 hours ago [-]
I like it
logicallee 16 hours ago [-]
Nice, I like it. The fonts are very interesting and captivating.
aanet 16 hours ago [-]
My eyes!!!
vpribish 8 hours ago [-]
you earned my upvote simple with the name "Times New Bastard". goddamn
khalic 17 hours ago [-]
Seeing the results makes me unreasonably angry… nice job :D
busymom0 17 hours ago [-]
Bookmarked for future use!
mock-possum 1 days ago [-]
Whoa this is really cool. Wish I had an excuse to use it for something… hmmm.
hmartin 18 hours ago [-]
Also clicking the logo is really fun!
peter_d_sherman 15 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...
electric_mayhem 17 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!
Sorry for the brutal honesty, just thought it might offer you an explanation of the difference in reaction.
OP's fonts look ugly, but intentionally and purposefully so, in a nails-on-chalkboard manner. In contrast, your example images just look plain ugly to me, can't imagine I would have any use for them.
Sorry again. I do understand the technological fascination with the process, just describing the aestheticity of the result here.
I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.
https://imgur.com/084vLca
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.
> 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/)
It's an out of place performative moralism.
Could one make in theory a regular monospaced font to just render glyphs past 80 chars of a line as bad as possible?
(...and yes, I see I'm not the first to suggest this.)
P.S. I saw keming and my mind went blank for a little while.
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.
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
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.
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.