Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard

429 points by MitPitt a day ago on hackernews | 58 comments

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

: hmartin | 6 hours ago
Also clicking the logo is really fun!

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

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

epiccoleman | 6 hours ago

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

xnx | 6 hours ago

Nice logo interaction too!

dvh | 6 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 | 6 hours ago

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

: amenghra | 4 hours ago
Do this as a captcha ;)
: smeehee | 4 hours ago
Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.

jrochkind1 | 5 hours ago

Thanks, I love-hate it.

ZeWaka | 5 hours ago

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

: demaga | 5 hours ago
I was thinking the same. Seems like a perfect fit for an 'escape simulator' room.
: cluckindan | an hour ago
Beware of licensing.

htrp | 5 hours ago

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

: Sharlin | 5 hours ago
Scroll down, they have an explicit example (with more fonts mixed in)

busymom0 | 5 hours ago

Bookmarked for future use!

mortenjorck | 5 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 | 4 hours ago

Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious

: mikestorrent | 3 hours ago
Yeah we need to see this
: danielheath | 2 hours ago
Open the effects submenu, 81% y-scale, 2% y-offset, papyrus on the left, comic sans on the right.

malfist | 2 hours ago

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

NietzscheanNull | 5 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)')

electric_mayhem | 5 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.

phren0logy | 5 hours ago

Thanks, I hate it.

philjohn | 5 hours ago

temu sans is beautifully on point

Sharlin | 5 hours ago

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

: shmeeed | 3 hours ago
>keming
I saw what you did there
: Asterism | an hour ago
Very dean and modem

gerdesj | 2 hours ago

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

khalic | 5 hours ago

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

dyingkneepad | 5 hours ago

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

Fliwatt | 5 hours 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

Sharlin | 5 hours ago

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

: sebmellen | 4 hours ago
Took me a moment.. hilarious

altairprime | 5 hours ago

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

: kstrauser | 4 hours ago
That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.

6thbit | 4 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?

thewakalix | 4 hours ago

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

This is truly the YTP of fonts.

aanet | 4 hours ago

My eyes!!!

logicallee | 4 hours ago

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

morbusfonticuli | 4 hours ago

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

krelas | 4 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.

: FuriouslyAdrift | 4 hours ago
calm down, Satan
: goodmythical | 3 hours ago
All S/E/R/I/F characters in a sans-serif font with the serif equivalent.

thecaio | 4 hours ago

Temu Sans cracked me up

zf00002 | 3 hours ago

Really fun op!

lathoa | 3 hours ago

I like it

peter_d_sherman | 3 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...

0gs | 2 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

qurren | 2 hours ago

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.

abdusco | 2 hours ago

I kinda dig Impacter. It looks quite stylish IMO.

hypfer | 2 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 | 38 minutes ago
I use a screen reader. Please do not do this.

patriciobcs | 2 hours ago

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

m463 | an hour 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.

furyofantares | an hour 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/)

flockonus | an hour 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)?