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ycombiredd 15 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 12 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".
ycombiredd 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds reasonable. I have a marketing problem. To restate what I get from your and other comments:
If I really want to spread something that brings me joy to other people so that they might experience it too, I may have to resort to polishing up the presentation. The fact that I'm trying to give something with no strings does not obviate the need to make it look palatable. This is a reasonable take I think. I also think I've known and have had a sense for that, even if I try to ignore it, because "selling" something is typically uninteresting to me. I'll try to keep it in mind the next time I have something I think I want to share with strangers, and put more effort into how it is presented so they might be more inclined to look into the actual thing I'm trying to show them.
I'll make my own analogy, with it being like trying to share a chocolate cake that looks like literal turds to strangers.
dostick 2 hours ago [-]
The difference is that today's tool has a demo website that makes the whole thing self-explanatory. Yours is a repository that speaks "figure it out".
xp84 2 hours ago [-]
This comment comes off as unnecessarily negative. They didn’t say they were mad that it didn’t get interest, and just shared it in case it may find an audience here. If you’re actually intending to give constructive advice rather than to discourage them or make them feel bad, there may have been a better way to say that.
Edit: such as amoss’s comment.
aargh_aargh 10 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 7 hours 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.
Barbing 2 hours ago [-]
More smaller font examples, just like in the OP, would help evaluate.
Essentially mirroring the original post, but using the fonts of their own [re]design.
paulhebert 15 hours ago [-]
This is cool! Thanks for sharing
mortenjorck 24 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 22 hours ago [-]
Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious
danielheath 20 hours ago [-]
Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.
If font humor is your thing, search for Elle Cordova’s videos on YouTube. They are absolute gems.
nitefood 9 hours ago [-]
Amazing! Thanks for a good laugh :-)
alterom 17 hours ago [-]
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.
malfist 21 hours ago [-]
You should also subtly adjust the skew to throw kerning way off
ButlerianJihad 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
xrd 21 minutes ago [-]
If I'm reading this correctly, this tool generates a new font by mixing fonts and altering proprieties of the fonts. In other words, a new font is produced.
Could you produce similar effects using pure CSS and/or JavaScript? Maybe it would be less deterministic and maybe the rendering would be slower, but could you do it this way?
krelas 22 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.
Someone 7 hours ago [-]
With ligatures, you could have a Helvetica font that writes “Helvetica”, “beautiful” and “aesthetics” in Arial.
FuriouslyAdrift 22 hours ago [-]
calm down, Satan
goodmythical 22 hours ago [-]
All S/E/R/I/F characters in a sans-serif font with the serif equivalent.
shagie 17 hours ago [-]
Ariel, don't swap glyphs ABCDFGHJKLMNOPQTUVWXYZabcdghjklmnopqtuvwxyz but every 1 glyph is Times Roman scaled to 120% ... https://imgur.com/a/xzv8zNh
tholman 17 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.
Inspired by the sample text for "Nervous Sans": "Anal", an Arial with bad keming
sebmellen 22 hours ago [-]
Took me a moment.. hilarious
altairprime 23 hours ago [-]
Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.
2 hours ago [-]
ryandrake 3 hours ago [-]
We have all seen that actual font in real life, too! Amazing in 2026, “text on paper” is a challenge.
Jarmsy 2 hours ago [-]
What's the actual process that leads to this look in reality?
projektfu 14 minutes ago [-]
I'm wondering the same thing. Something about making proportional fonts fit into blocks for Chinese text?
kstrauser 22 hours ago [-]
That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.
beAbU 12 hours ago [-]
All those presets are brilliantly named.
dvh 24 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 24 hours ago [-]
Do this on a document to determine who is copy-pasting or reading it with AI.
smeehee 22 hours ago [-]
Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.
servo_sausage 12 hours ago [-]
Accessibility should only ever be an addition, never a limit.
Semkas 8 hours ago [-]
Why should that be true?
servo_sausage 7 hours 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.
Semkas 4 hours ago [-]
We will all become, or temporarily be, fundamentally limited at times in our life.
It's trivial to build something that accommodates an ideal user, the challenge in software engineering is creating a solution that suits many kinds of people, at different points in their life. Refusing to engage with that challenge is a kind of proud mediocrity.
ryandrake 3 hours ago [-]
Engineering is fundamentally about building within limitations.
20 hours ago [-]
amenghra 23 hours ago [-]
Do this as a captcha ;)
6thbit 23 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?
dspillett 5 hours ago [-]
To either heighten or smooth out the effect, you could use ligature support. Perhaps for double-letters (like the tt in letter) only change one of the pair.
Heck, while you are messing around with ligatures you could be really evil and use them to introduce typos, or unwanted corrections (color→colour)…
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.
dyingkneepad 23 hours ago [-]
Royal Ransom Note just downloaded! It will be great to never have to cut magazines again!
sasaf5 15 hours ago [-]
Oh, and all the glueing it takes... I hate that part.
2 hours ago [-]
philjohn 23 hours ago [-]
temu sans is beautifully on point
Sharlin 23 hours ago [-]
More subtle keming adjustments so that the font looks just slightly "off" would be great too.
thenthenthen 14 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.
deburo 2 hours ago [-]
Ah, so that's why. Do the big Chinese companies handle this well? Alibaba, perhaps? Huawei, surely? By owning the packaging and shipping?
tuetuopay 11 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.
thenthenthen 2 hours ago [-]
Can give the designers some slack, drawing 5000+ gliphs is not an easy task.
Sharlin 1 hours ago [-]
The latin part of CJK fonts is often some crappy Times clone that they throw in as an afterthought.
I'm old enough to remember newspaper articles with kerning like that.
NietzscheanNull 24 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)')
ayaros 11 hours ago [-]
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.)
ZeWaka 24 hours ago [-]
This is beautiful. I think I'll have to use this for a game.
cluckindan 19 hours ago [-]
Beware of licensing.
demaga 23 hours ago [-]
I was thinking the same. Seems like a perfect fit for an 'escape simulator' room.
RandyOrion 14 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.
hackeryojo 16 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 23 hours ago [-]
> Bastardica can make simple fonts feel a little, hmm, richer?
This is truly the YTP of fonts.
furyofantares 20 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/)
and I don't know who to report it to. I guess it's owned by Microsoft so also not surprised.
TomMasz 7 hours 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.
samteeeee 21 minutes ago [-]
LOLed at "Temu Sans"
lelanthran 1 days ago [-]
I have to admit, I spent way more time on this than required (giggling madly at my creations)
dumbfounder 15 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/
hypfer 20 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 18 hours ago [-]
I use a screen reader. Please do not do this.
m463 20 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.
flockonus 19 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)?
sumit734655 3 hours ago [-]
Head panel jecne ke liye
DylanMerigaud 12 hours ago [-]
Scope creep transformed your ambigram tool into something interesting.
schnebbau 10 hours ago [-]
Well today I learned corner-shape is a CSS property now.
Rinkia 11 hours ago [-]
created the ultimate monster, papyrus + comic sans every 3 glyph
Aduttya 15 hours ago [-]
Looking at current AI apps it's more of an integrater into current LLMs rather replacement?
thecaio 22 hours ago [-]
Temu Sans cracked me up
abdusco 20 hours ago [-]
I kinda dig Impacter. It looks quite stylish IMO.
patriciobcs 20 hours ago [-]
cool app, maybe make the logo at the bottom clickable so is easier to see the main page, also very cool.
dzulp0d 17 hours ago [-]
Love it. Also, why do shady electronic manuals look like that?
newtwentysix 13 hours ago [-]
Good one. My friends are having a fun time
micheljansen 11 hours ago [-]
Temu Sans is very on the nose.
morbusfonticuli 22 hours ago [-]
I love it! Every click on the title will also change its bastard font :-)
epiccoleman 24 hours ago [-]
Love this, I had a lot of fun and more than a few laughs messing around with it.
htrp 24 hours ago [-]
This looks like the cut out magazine ransom letters you see in every movie.
Sharlin 23 hours ago [-]
Scroll down, they have an explicit example (with more fonts mixed in)
xnx 24 hours ago [-]
Nice logo interaction too!
jrochkind1 24 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I love-hate it.
DonHopkins 18 hours ago [-]
I wish I could make Dijkstra Dingbats.
omegadynamics 16 hours ago [-]
this is just Grotesk
cengizIO 12 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.
repple 16 hours ago [-]
love it! Temu Sans.. hahaha
zf00002 22 hours ago [-]
Really fun op!
phren0logy 24 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I hate it.
shagie 18 hours ago [-]
Courier mixed with courier, but every 11th glyph is scaled 80% vertically (retains 100% horizontal). Monospace remains, but things are off.
smugglerFlynn 10 hours ago [-]
This is seriously cool, Mitya
lathoa 21 hours ago [-]
I like it
logicallee 22 hours ago [-]
Nice, I like it. The fonts are very interesting and captivating.
aanet 22 hours ago [-]
My eyes!!!
khalic 23 hours ago [-]
Seeing the results makes me unreasonably angry… nice job :D
busymom0 24 hours ago [-]
Bookmarked for future use!
mock-possum 2 days ago [-]
Whoa this is really cool. Wish I had an excuse to use it for something… hmmm.
hmartin 1 days ago [-]
Also clicking the logo is really fun!
vpribish 15 hours ago [-]
you earned my upvote simple with the name "Times New Bastard". goddamn
peter_d_sherman 21 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 24 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.
0gs 21 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
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!
If I really want to spread something that brings me joy to other people so that they might experience it too, I may have to resort to polishing up the presentation. The fact that I'm trying to give something with no strings does not obviate the need to make it look palatable. This is a reasonable take I think. I also think I've known and have had a sense for that, even if I try to ignore it, because "selling" something is typically uninteresting to me. I'll try to keep it in mind the next time I have something I think I want to share with strangers, and put more effort into how it is presented so they might be more inclined to look into the actual thing I'm trying to show them.
I'll make my own analogy, with it being like trying to share a chocolate cake that looks like literal turds to strangers.
Edit: such as amoss’s comment.
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.
Essentially mirroring the original post, but using the fonts of their own [re]design.
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.
Could you produce similar effects using pure CSS and/or JavaScript? Maybe it would be less deterministic and maybe the rendering would be slower, but could you do it this way?
> 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.
It's trivial to build something that accommodates an ideal user, the challenge in software engineering is creating a solution that suits many kinds of people, at different points in their life. Refusing to engage with that challenge is a kind of proud mediocrity.
Could one make in theory a regular monospaced font to just render glyphs past 80 chars of a line as bad as possible?
Heck, while you are messing around with ligatures you could be really evil and use them to introduce typos, or unwanted corrections (color→colour)…
I saw what you did there
FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):
(...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.
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.
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.