[HN Gopher] Teranoptia - a typeface that allows you to imagine c...
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Teranoptia - a typeface that allows you to imagine chimeric
creatures
Author : dchest
Score : 337 points
Date : 2024-05-02 09:49 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tunera.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tunera.xyz)
| wayvey wrote:
| Does this use ligatures to join up parts of these creatures
| together?
| happytoexplain wrote:
| It appears to use the good old-fashioned technique of making
| the edges of each character have the same profile, so any two
| characters abut seamlessly. You can put your cursor on them to
| see this.
|
| Also, when I want to know what some string is actually composed
| of, I like to copy-paste it into
| https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html
|
| Edit: Sorry, I answered your question as though you had asked
| about joiner characters. Still, it appears not to use
| ligatures, as the characters appear not to change at all if you
| separate them.
| Zeratoss wrote:
| Wow this looks amazing.
|
| I have never seen fonts used like this.
|
| Any other examples?
| marban wrote:
| Zapf dingbats :)
| happytoexplain wrote:
| I think the parent means using a font to create the illusion
| of a continuous image, not just the concept of a pictographic
| font.
| jprete wrote:
| 8-bit-era computers like the C64 (which were all monospace) had
| glyphs in the font for making borders and lines and the like.
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| Fontemon - a playable Pokemon-style game in a font file
|
| https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
| blikstiender wrote:
| This is really fun!
|
| What would be really satisfying would be to be able to make
| "creatures" out of real words. Currently a lot of the common
| vowels represent "end" segments (either heads or tails).
| jprete wrote:
| I like that idea! Probably needs ligatures or some way to get
| glyphs to overlap or reverse direction.
| pimlottc wrote:
| The regex for this (for left-facing creatures) is
| ^[aeimpvy][bcfgjknqtw]*[dhloruxz]$
|
| Unfortunately, as you point out, all the vowels are in the end
| segments, so there's no creatures with a midbody longer than 2
| letters. Here's what you get [0]:
|
| ad ago ah and ankh awl ax ego eh end er etch ex id inch into
| itch
|
| However, you can also include words that form multiple
| creatures [1]. Some favorites:
|
| aggrandizer alexander equalizer inlander mumbler phalanx
| poacher prelingual voided
|
| 0:
| https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfgj...
|
| 1: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E(%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfg
| ...*
| pimlottc wrote:
| It actually gets a tiny bit better for upper case letters, as
| the midbody character set includes both U and Y. So the
| winner for longest single-creature word is: ADJUDGE
|
| Other good ones [0]:
|
| AUTUMN IMPUGN OUTGUN SMUDGE AUGUR FUDGE FUGUE LYMPH
|
| 0: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E%5Bacfilosw%5D%5Bdg
| jm...
| feoren wrote:
| I love some of the interpretation of symbol characters. Check
| these out: - * ($) [$$] {$$$} ,
|
| I particularly like the asterisk being a starfish -- quite in
| character for the font.
|
| I found myself wishing that the capital letters went in the same
| order as the lowercase. To reverse 'a' you have to type 'Z', and
| to reverse 'b' you have to type 'Y', which gets confusing toward
| the middle of the alphabet.
| nevir wrote:
| Could ligatures be used to make the heads/tails automatic?
| (e.g. first letter of any word is rendered as a head, last
| letter always a tail)
| pimlottc wrote:
| Ah, I didn't realize there was a preview text field at the
| bottom of the page! Looked like another page decoration
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Great for tabletop RPGs!
| wizardwes wrote:
| Agreed, and then I thought about using it with OpenSCAD to do
| insets on some dice boxes as well
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Interesting. For directions and mapping, a font that showed
| turns, highway markers, and road signs could help a person
| "think" in terms of direction or orientation.
|
| Since they are recognizable glyphs, we shortcut having to learn
| grammar and vocabulary; meaning is already "natively encoded" in
| the existing language.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| /\--
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Hang on, since when did HN allow emoji?
| dang wrote:
| We filter out ranges of Unicode characters that have been
| used for junk posts in the past, but there are many other
| ranges that have occasional legit use and are allowed.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Stratagem too complex, controller is broken.
| janetmissed wrote:
| This is adorable, I had so much fun seeing what creatures I could
| make.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| This is really cool, I've had so much fun putting together
| critters this morning!
|
| I threw together a little page on my site that has a textarea
| where you can try out the font, if you want to experiment without
| having to download it yourself.
|
| https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2024-05-02-teranoptia-playgrou...
|
| I'd like to toss together a little table of the symbols too, and
| I also thought it would be cool to use html2canvas to let people
| download a picture of their creation. Maybe I'll get around to
| that after work tonight.
| california-og wrote:
| The author of the font made it also Glyph Drawing Club
| "compatible", which is a modular shape builder I've built that
| works with font files. You can just drag and drop an otf or ttf
| file on the app window and it'll load the glyphs as svg shapes
| to draw with. The neat thing is that it works in two
| dimensions, and you can also rotate (with r hotkey) or invert
| (with i hotkey) the glyphs, and output the drawing as SVG or
| PNG.
|
| https://glyphdrawing.club
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Wow, that is really cool. I'll definitely be playing with
| this later, thanks for the tip!
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Thanks. Kinda expected (or at least I do, being accustomed to
| Google Fonts) nowadays a font-hosting site to have something
| like that.
|
| edit: Just saw sibling comment that placeholder text is
| editable. Hadn't noticed it.
| breadwinner wrote:
| The creatures at the bottom of the page are editable already.
| devin wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't realize this.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| D'oh! Of course they are haha. It didn't even occur to me to
| try.
|
| Edit: I guess one neat thing about my page is that you get a
| readout of the characters in your critter. Obviously you
| could just copy-paste from that field at the bottom of the
| Tunera page into any other text field and find out that way,
| but I did find it helpful when I was trying to experiment.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Your /assets/me.jpg is a 1.3MB image, but is only displayed at
| very small thumbnail size on your page.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Great feedback, I'll look into reducing the size of that
| image, especially for the post headers. Thanks for checking
| out the site!
| noman-land wrote:
| Wow, this is so incredibly cool.
| incidentist wrote:
| Well this is utterly wonderful.
| semireg wrote:
| Me and the 6 year old have been making Pokemon cards and
| generating AI character images based on chimeras. This morning on
| the way to school we dreamt up a knight+scorpion with tons of
| armor. Basic: knightstrike, stage 1: knightbite, stage 2:
| knightflight.
|
| Totally installing this font on the kid's rasp pi. This will be a
| fun way to explore the keyboard. Love it.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The characters for the demonstration at the bottom of the page:
|
| abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
|
| abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.:;, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
| 1234567890 @ &!?#%
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| And to maybe save you some playing around to figure out which
| segments are which: Middles: qwtfgjkcbn
| Heads: eyip[asvm, Tails: ruo]dhlzx
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(page generated 2024-05-02 23:00 UTC)