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Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard

531 pointsby 1d agobastardica.mitpit.com
77 comments
A joke tool that abuses OpenType's ligature feature to mix fonts. It works pretty fast on client-side by loading Python in WASM.
21h agoHN ↗

Whoa this is really cool. Wish I had an excuse to use it for something… hmmm.

9h agoHN ↗

I have to admit, I spent way more time on this than required (giggling madly at my creations)

9h agoHN ↗

Love this, I had a lot of fun and more than a few laughs messing around with it.

9h agoHN ↗

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".

9h agoHN ↗

Do this on a document to determine who is copy-pasting or reading it with AI.

7h agoHN ↗

Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.

9h agoHN ↗

This is beautiful. I think I'll have to use this for a game.

9h agoHN ↗

I was thinking the same. Seems like a perfect fit for an 'escape simulator' room.

9h agoHN ↗

This looks like the cut out magazine ransom letters you see in every movie.

8h agoHN ↗

Scroll down, they have an explicit example (with more fonts mixed in)

9h agoHN ↗

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.

7h agoHN ↗

Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious

6h agoHN ↗

Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.

6h agoHN ↗

You should also subtly adjust the skew to throw kerning way off

3h agoHN ↗

"The new avatar logo is bastardized papyrus in bold" does have a ring too it.

2h agoHN ↗

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.

9h agoHN ↗

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)')
9h agoHN ↗

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.

3h agoHN ↗

Courier mixed with courier, but every 11th glyph is scaled 80% vertically (retains 100% horizontal). Monospace remains, but things are off.

8h agoHN ↗

More subtle keming adjustments so that the font looks just slightly "off" would be great too.

6h agoHN ↗

I'm old enough to remember newspaper articles with kerning like that.

9h agoHN ↗

Seeing the results makes me unreasonably angry… nice job :D

9h agoHN ↗

Royal Ransom Note just downloaded! It will be great to never have to cut magazines again!

1h agoHN ↗

Oh, and all the glueing it takes... I hate that part.

8h agoHN ↗

Inspired by the sample text for "Nervous Sans": "Anal", an Arial with bad keming

8h agoHN ↗

Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.

7h agoHN ↗

That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.

8h agoHN ↗

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?

8h agoHN ↗

Bastardica can make simple fonts feel a little, hmm, richer?

This is truly the YTP of fonts.

8h agoHN ↗

Nice, I like it. The fonts are very interesting and captivating.

8h agoHN ↗

I love it! Every click on the title will also change its bastard font :-)

7h agoHN ↗

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.

7h agoHN ↗

All S/E/R/I/F characters in a sans-serif font with the serif equivalent.

7h agoHN ↗

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...

6h agoHN ↗

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

5h agoHN ↗

I kinda dig Impacter. It looks quite stylish IMO.

5h agoHN ↗

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.

4h agoHN ↗

I use a screen reader. Please do not do this.

5h agoHN ↗

cool app, maybe make the logo at the bottom clickable so is easier to see the main page, also very cool.

5h agoHN ↗

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.

4h agoHN ↗

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)?

3h agoHN ↗

I wish I could make Dijkstra Dingbats.

2h agoHN ↗

Love it. Also, why do shady electronic manuals look like that?

2h agoHN ↗

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.

- [1](https://tholman.com/post/smelvetica/)

1h agoHN ↗

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)

54m agoHN ↗

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!

37m agoHN ↗

Looking at current AI apps it's more of an integrater into current LLMs rather replacement?

23m agoHN ↗

you earned my upvote simple with the name "Times New Bastard". goddamn