A font that reads what you wrote

A font that reads what you wrote rohanadwankar.github.io

97 points•RohanAdwankar•11 days ago•44 comments•

44 comments

The idea is amazing, and… how to say it?; The results are horrible to read in the same way as AI writing when AI writing is bad.†

And I mean this in the best possible way. It's really interesting.

There's this feeling of an intrusive forcing of something. A feeling that things don't… breathe? Feels like one already sifts out this sort of semantic weight when reading and to me the highlighting adds strange janky emotional-processing noise to the text; Uncomfortable and somewhat… dissonant?

It's really, really interesting. I hate how disparaging to the project this comes out!! my apologies for that! I LOVE the project and what it reveals about text comprehension and perception of saliency and rhythm in written text!

(† footnote: feels like this to me)

RohanAdwankar8 days ago

Thanks this is such a thoughtful comment! This project was definitely more to explore the idea than to make it certain that this was the answer. I think my goal was more so from the perspective of if text is streaming by very fast like it would be for an agent is there anything we can do to make it easier to read. The answer may genuinely be no but I think if we can get to something where the program highlights things accurately then in theory the reader could skim faster. I remember debaters who have to speak/read very fast highlight and format the sources (https://youtu.be/0FPsEwWT6K0?t=121&is=7fFn3BjKUnJKPXu3) so in theory it may be helpful for high speed cases. But I definitely agree with your point that it would be annoying if for example a book was formatted in this way haha

great_tankard8 days ago

i completely agree with this. it's a very cool idea and also i hope nobody uses it in actual writing

frereubu9 days ago

Not working in Firefox. I get this error:

  Uncaught TypeError: The specifier “semfont/analyze” was a bare specifier, but was not remapped to anything. Relative module specifiers must start with “./”, “../” or “/”.

Works in Chrome though.

jstanley9 days ago

Here was me thinking it just didn't do anything at all.

RohanAdwankar9 days ago

Thanks for calling that out! Someone from here has fixed it: https://github.com/RohanAdwankar/RohanAdwankar.github.io/pul... Thanks Jakub!

AndyNemmity9 days ago

yup, just broken for me.

skrebbel8 days ago

This isn't a font, it's just a JS lib that colors text based on semantic analysis. Submission title oversells it by a lot.

RohanAdwankar8 days ago

My bad on the title, I was trying to think of a good name to describe what it was intuitively but couldn’t figure it out at the time. Wasnt trying to be clickbaity

tensegrist9 days ago

i thought the computation was within the font itself

https://github.com/RoelN/SansBullshitSans https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/ https://github.com/trishume/numderline

which can be taken rather far

https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html

RohanAdwankar8 days ago

woah i didnt know this was a thing thanks for sharing!!

purple-leafy8 days ago

Woah

brk9 days ago

Seems to require Chrome? In Firefox it's just a text box, nothing happens. Was confused at first about what it was supposed to do, the rest of the page made it clear it was supposed to mess about with whatever text you write.

Trying it in Chrome and seeing the results I'm not sure that it is really that helpful. Has undertones of elementary school grammar lessons highlighting words in sentences.

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