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.
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.
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".
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
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.
I don't yet know who I'll be pranking with the downloaded font, but I look forward to their reaction.
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.
Could one make in theory a regular monospaced font to just render glyphs past 80 chars of a line as bad as possible?
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.
This is truly the YTP of fonts.
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):
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.