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!

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.

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.

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/)

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

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

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

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".

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?

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

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

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.

temu sans is beautifully on point

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)')

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

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)…

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

This is truly the YTP of fonts.

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/)

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)

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

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.

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.

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.)

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?

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...

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.

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.

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/

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.

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)?

Temu Sans cracked me up

I kinda dig Impacter. It looks quite stylish IMO.

I wish I could make Dijkstra Dingbats.

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

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

Scope creep transformed your ambigram tool into something interesting.

created the ultimate monster, papyrus + comic sans every 3 glyph

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

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

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

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

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

Well today I learned corner-shape is a CSS property now.

Nice logo interaction too!

Could we try with Google Fonts somehow?

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

This is some derangement I can get into.

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.

Thanks, I love-hate it.

Good one. My friends are having a fun time

Temu Sans is very on the nose.

Head panel jecne ke liye

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

Bookmarked for future use!

this is just Grotesk

Really fun op!

Thanks, I hate it.

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.

love it! Temu Sans.. hahaha

I like it

My eyes!!!

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

This is seriously cool, Mitya

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

LOLed at "Temu Sans"

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