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'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.
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".
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.
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.
Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious
Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.
Yeah we need to see this
You should also subtly adjust the skew to throw kerning way off
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.
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.
calm down, Satan
All S/E/R/I/F characters in a sans-serif font with the serif equivalent.
Inspired by the sample text for "Nervous Sans": "Anal", an Arial with bad keming
Took me a moment.. hilarious
There is a lot of fun stuff you can do with fonts. A friend of mine made a self-censoring font: Paranoia Sans https://github.com/flegfleg/Paranoia-Sans
cool app, maybe make the logo at the bottom clickable so is easier to see the main page, also very cool.
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".
Do this on a document to determine who is copy-pasting or reading it with AI.
Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.
Do this as a captcha ;)
I kinda dig Impacter. It looks quite stylish IMO.
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?
My LinkedIn UI already looks like that
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.
Some of these effects are actually really easy to do with CSS @font-face & unicode-range. See: view-source:https://hlnet.neocities.org/font-face-tricks
Royal Ransom Note just downloaded! It will be great to never have to cut magazines again!
Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.
That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.
> Bastardica can make simple fonts feel a little, hmm, richer?
This is truly the YTP of fonts.
temu sans is beautifully on point
I'm old enough to remember newspaper articles with kerning like that.
More subtle keming adjustments so that the font looks just slightly "off" would be great too.
>keming
I saw what you did there
This is beautiful. I think I'll have to use this for a game.
I was thinking the same. Seems like a perfect fit for an 'escape simulator' room.
This is great!
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
I have to admit, I spent way more time on this than required (giggling madly at my creations)
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
I love it! Every click on the title will also change its bastard font :-)
Temu Sans cracked me up
This looks like the cut out magazine ransom letters you see in every movie.
Scroll down, they have an explicit example (with more fonts mixed in)
Love this, I had a lot of fun and more than a few laughs messing around with it.
Nice logo interaction too!
Thanks, I love-hate it.
Really fun op!
I like it
Nice, I like it. The fonts are very interesting and captivating.
My eyes!!!
Seeing the results makes me unreasonably angry… nice job :D
Bookmarked for future use!
Whoa this is really cool. Wish I had an excuse to use it for something… hmmm.
Also clicking the logo is really fun!
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...
Thanks, I hate it.
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.