Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard

(bastardica.mitpit.com)

326 points | by MitPitt a day ago ago

48 comments

  • mortenjorck 3 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.

    • malfist 2 minutes ago

      You should also subtly adjust the skew to throw kerning way off

    • Obscurity4340 2 hours ago

      Care to share somehow, sounds delightfully hilarious

  • krelas 2 hours 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.

    • FuriouslyAdrift 2 hours ago

      calm down, Satan

    • goodmythical an hour ago

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

  • qurren 5 minutes ago

    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.

  • Sharlin 3 hours ago

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

    • sebmellen 2 hours ago

      Took me a moment.. hilarious

  • Fliwatt 3 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

  • dvh 3 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".

    • someonebaggy 3 hours ago

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

      • smeehee an hour ago

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

      • amenghra 2 hours ago

        Do this as a captcha ;)

  • 6thbit 2 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-og 4 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

  • dyingkneepad 3 hours ago

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

  • altairprime 2 hours ago

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

    • kstrauser 2 hours ago

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

  • thewakalix 2 hours ago

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

    This is truly the YTP of fonts.

  • philjohn 3 hours ago

    temu sans is beautifully on point

    • gerdesj 5 minutes ago

      I'm old enough to remember newspaper articles with kerning like that.

    • Sharlin 3 hours ago

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

      • shmeeed an hour ago

        >keming

        I saw what you did there

  • ZeWaka 3 hours ago

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

    • demaga 3 hours ago

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

  • NietzscheanNull 3 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)')
  • 0gs 14 minutes ago

    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

  • lelanthran 4 hours ago

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

  • morbusfonticuli 2 hours ago

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

  • thecaio 2 hours ago

    Temu Sans cracked me up

  • htrp 3 hours ago

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

    • Sharlin 3 hours ago

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

  • epiccoleman 3 hours ago

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

  • zf00002 an hour ago

    Really fun op!

  • xnx 3 hours ago

    Nice logo interaction too!

  • lathoa an hour ago

    I like it

  • jrochkind1 3 hours ago

    Thanks, I love-hate it.

  • logicallee 2 hours ago

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

  • aanet 2 hours ago

    My eyes!!!

  • khalic 3 hours ago

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

  • peter_d_sherman an hour 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...

  • busymom0 3 hours ago

    Bookmarked for future use!

  • mock-possum 16 hours ago

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

    • hmartin 4 hours ago

      Also clicking the logo is really fun!

  • phren0logy 3 hours ago

    Thanks, I hate it.

  • electric_mayhem 3 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.