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MitPitt
Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard bastardica.mitpit.com

A joke tool that abuses OpenType's ligature feature to mix fonts. It works pretty fast on client-side by loading Python in WASM.


mortenjorck3 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.

Obscurity4340an hour ago

Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious

mikestorrent13 minutes ago

Yeah we need to see this

krelasan hour 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.

FuriouslyAdriftan hour ago

calm down, Satan

goodmythicalan hour ago

All S/E/R/I/F characters in a sans-serif font with the serif equivalent.

Sharlin2 hours ago

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

sebmellenan hour ago

Took me a moment.. hilarious

Fliwatt2 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

dvh3 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".

someonebaggy3 hours ago

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

smeeheean hour ago

Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.

amenghra2 hours ago

Do this as a captcha ;)

6thbit2 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?

california-og3 hours ago

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

dyingkneepad2 hours ago

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

thewakalix2 hours ago

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

This is truly the YTP of fonts.

philjohn3 hours ago

temu sans is beautifully on point

Sharlin2 hours ago

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

shmeeed43 minutes ago

>keming

I saw what you did there

ZeWaka3 hours ago

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

demaga2 hours ago

I was thinking the same. Seems like a perfect fit for an 'escape simulator' room.

NietzscheanNull3 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)')

altairprime2 hours ago

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

kstrauseran hour ago

That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.

lelanthran3 hours ago

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

morbusfonticulian hour ago

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

lathoa34 minutes ago

I like it

zf00002an hour ago

Really fun op!

htrp3 hours ago

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

Sharlin2 hours ago

Scroll down, they have an explicit example (with more fonts mixed in)

epiccoleman3 hours ago

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

thecaioan hour ago

Temu Sans cracked me up

xnx3 hours ago

Nice logo interaction too!

jrochkind13 hours ago

Thanks, I love-hate it.

logicalleean hour ago

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

aanet2 hours ago

My eyes!!!

khalic3 hours ago

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

busymom03 hours ago

Bookmarked for future use!

mock-possum15 hours ago

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

hmartin3 hours ago

Also clicking the logo is really fun!

peter_d_sherman31 minutes 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...

electric_mayhem3 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.

phren0logy3 hours ago

Thanks, I hate it.

imshaikotan hour ago

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iFarted42 minutes ago

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