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!
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.
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.
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".
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.
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)
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.
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.
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/)
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
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.
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.
> 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/)
P.S. I saw keming and my mind went blank for a little while.
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.
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.