[HN Gopher] Teranoptia - a typeface that allows you to imagine c...
___________________________________________________________________
Teranoptia - a typeface that allows you to imagine chimeric
creatures
Author : dchest
Score : 512 points
Date : 2024-05-02 09:49 UTC (2 days 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
| gnulinux wrote:
| That game data is text, and that you reverse the game by
| hitting backspace are interesting ideas. I'm curious if there
| is any utility beyond novelty though. It's certainly very
| creative, I'll be thinking about it.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| https://www.vectrotype.com/chartwell
| enasterosophes wrote:
| https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/
|
| > The font that replaces every buzzword by a Comic Sans-styled
| censorship bar
| 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
| tetris11 wrote:
| try also (German Keyboard): * AltGr-X or Y
| (two way pipe) * AltGr-E (vertical bar) *
| AltGr-J (adds dots vertically below last character)
|
| Their `Shift' variants also invert the placement
|
| Edit: Oh I just realised the "J" one is a German Keyboard
| symbol stacker and nothing to do with the font..
| 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.
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Yes, like those. I guess a whole LSP that revolves around
| destinations and memory. To compile it is to reach some
| satisfactory state where the model--and this differs from
| person to person--reflects reality: total minutes spent or
| miles travelled.
|
| I guess games already enable the forward, forward, turning,
| and such. But wayfinding is tacit: one person gets lost;
| another notes the top of the tower, descends into a dark
| thicket, flanks a camp of orcs, and somehow heads in more or
| less the way.
|
| Of course, some of that is just going with the flow. Not so
| in traffic, in an unknown place, jostled by rail tracks and
| wondering whether to U-turn or not. (Unfamiliar roads, and
| was it east or west?)
|
| A friend said they note landmarks. Or maybe one should have
| heuristics, like three lefts is parallel to one right. One
| thing for certain: without GPS, it is hopeless.
| 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!
| araes wrote:
| This is pretty neat, and cool as a design style for doing
| "tilesque" types of drawing. Would there happen to be a way
| to add your own tileset, font, or tile atlas? Would then
| allow for rather quick tilemap creation (GB, NES, SNES style;
| a lot of cell phone games, many Steam releases, ect...). Lots
| of market. 500 games released last week on Steam.
| https://steamdb.info/upcoming/?lastweek Out of the 28 so far
| today, 6 appear to be tile based.
|
| If not, may borrow at least some of the design features for a
| project, as with a bit of simplification in a few areas, and
| changes for cell phones, it would actually make a nice way
| for users to interact with tile based games. Place an object,
| move an object, flip an object.
|
| The tab based design and layout also works nicely desktop to
| phone for the most part, which is a nice plus for adaptation.
|
| Anyways, neat tool, and especially design flow and layout.
| Also, the 15 pages of font use on https://velvetyne.fr/in-
| use/ is pretty crazy to look at.
|
| EDIT: Also, to the author of Teranoptia, the licensing layout
| is actually rather nice and really clear about uses
| immediately. Lot of the web has vague license names, yet the
| direct use listing is beneficial.
| 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!
| epiccoleman wrote:
| Quick imagemagick command got it down to 22kb, and a
| slightly larger one for the frontpage is now only 80kb. The
| frontpage load feels a lot snappier now, thanks again for
| the tip!
| 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.
| febed wrote:
| How do you go about doing this? Would like it to try it out too
| tiptup300 wrote:
| also curious
| semireg wrote:
| I use ChatGPT mobile app and brainstorm. I only show the
| child the results. Here's a prompt: "Grim reaper wolf pet in
| style of Pokemon character. Make the body just out of skull
| and bones."
|
| Then I take this image to any of the number of online card
| creators. None are perfect. Most are half broken. You can use
| ChatGPT to make names. For example, we made a card for my
| wife who's an attorney. We asked for character names based on
| her profession (law) unique last name with a fire theme. Then
| we asked for attack descriptions. I used these, heavily
| edited, to create a full card with her "likeness."
|
| Flaming justice hammer, anyone?!
|
| For printing I use a laser printer w duplex. I have a
| trial/error workflow for lining up 4-up cards. I use a heavy
| poly cardstock from Terraslate. I think the 10 mil. It's
| pretty close look/feel and they will last a long time.
|
| These are purely for our own enjoyment, but we have also done
| play dates where we make custom cards for friends that visit.
|
| The only downside is every kid wants their character to have
| 300+ HP. Ha!
| Biganon wrote:
| Thank you for doing that with you kid
| 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
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Facing right Middles: QMPGXJUDYT
| Heads: RHNEZVBK Tails: WFLASCIO special:
| []-{}\*()
| stevage wrote:
| This is really fun.
|
| Surprised it doesn't come with instructions about which letters
| map onto left/right start/middle/end.
|
| Also, the choice of those mappings is not very intuitive. A
| simple idea might have been a-g starts, h-t middles, u-z ends,
| for instance.
| dchest wrote:
| I mapped A-Z, a-z in a spreadsheet:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/pMKdX3i
|
| for the purpose of generating random chimeras :)
|
| https://twitter.com/dchest/status/1786033028034125984
|
| Here's a list for the left-to-right ones:
| const tails = "dhloruxzER" const bodies = "bcfgjknqtw"
| const heads = "aempsy"
| eb0la wrote:
| My kids will love it. I am supporting the author right now :-)
| birracerveza wrote:
| This is great!
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| Finally, a typeface that allows me to imagine chimeric creatures.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| The art style reminds me of Ben Awad's Neopet project
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-04 23:01 UTC)