A joke tool that abuses OpenType's ligature feature to mix fonts. It works pretty fast on client-side by loading Python in WASM.

861 points•MitPitt•7 days ago•123 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.

123 comments

ycombiredd6 days 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!

amoss6 days 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".
ycombiredd5 days 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.

aargh_aargh6 days 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.

brettermeier6 days 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.
paulhebert6 days ago
This is cool! Thanks for sharing
dostick5 days 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".
xp845 days 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.

mortenjorck6 days 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.

Obscurity43406 days ago
Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious
danielheath6 days ago
Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.
mikestorrent6 days ago
Yeah we need to see this
coffee-on-thurs6 days ago
Here you go: https://filebin.net/v31in1w6jh1wp9g4

It will show up as "Papyrus and Comic Sans MS Bastard".

Now why you want this is the real question.

schiffern6 days ago

  >Papyrus and Comic Sans MS
Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ

Apparently there's a sequel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8PdffUfoF0

alterom6 days 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.

soperj6 days ago
"The new avatar logo is bastardized papyrus in bold" does have a ring too it.
malfist6 days ago
You should also subtly adjust the skew to throw kerning way off
krelas6 days 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.
FuriouslyAdrift6 days ago
calm down, Satan
goodmythical6 days ago
All S/E/R/I/F characters in a sans-serif font with the serif equivalent.
shagie6 days ago
Ariel, don't swap glyphs ABCDFGHJKLMNOPQTUVWXYZabcdghjklmnopqtuvwxyz but every 1 glyph is Times Roman scaled to 120% ... https://imgur.com/a/xzv8zNh
Someone6 days ago
With ligatures, you could have a Helvetica font that writes “Helvetica”, “beautiful” and “aesthetics” in Arial.
tholman6 days 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.

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

Fliwatt6 days ago
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

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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