I'm not sure if the serif-icity is the jarring part, I think it's the different point size (or whatever that word is for the horizontal height lines that fonts live within).

I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.

> I think it's the different point size (or whatever that word is for the horizontal height lines that fonts live within).

Agreed! The x-height [0] (among other things) differs jarringly between the serif and sans fonts used.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-height#:~:text=In%20typogr....

I wish you could specify the x-height of a font in CSS. If you mix serif and sans serif you want them to look like they have the same size. It would have been nice if the default browser fonts were selected to have the same x-height.

There's a lot of variable typefaces that let you set the x-height, which can be controlled via CSS.

Soon! https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/commit/1fae25fa283c708f7...

> It would have been nice if the default browser fonts were selected

Yes.

People really seem to hate "handwritten" fonts. Comic Sans is the mainstream example, but there are a lot of other ones.

As others said, stylistic alternatives definitely exist in most font packages, especially commercial ones used with Adobe products. So the fact that they are not widely used outside of graphic design probably goes back to people generally hate fonts that look handwritten for anything besides wedding invitations.

I see a lot of the "why do people hate Comic Sans" articles on the web think it's just because it's a handwritten, casual font used in inappropriate situations, but this seems like post-hoc rationalization. It's the Comic Sans look specifically that people intensely dislike, not "handwritten" fonts in general.

The original and better case against Comic Sans was that there were much better handwritten, comic-text-style fonts and that Comic Sans was a particularly bad instance of one.

Just ask Dave Gibbons:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/aug/12/dave-gibb...

>"It's just a shame they couldn't have used just the original font, because it's a real mess. I think it's a particularly ugly letter form," he says. "The other thing that really bugs me that they've used an upper case I with bars on it: it looks completely wrong to the comic eye. And when you see store fronts done in it, it's horrible."

> it's just because it's a handwritten, casual font used in inappropriate situations

It's a handwritten, casual font used in inappropriate situations /and the only available for anything 'fancy' on the Average Computer used by Average Joe/.

stylistically, my personal taste is that Comic Sans is exactly the right font to use for serious warning signs like in a kitchen, such as "DON'T TOUCH, handle gets HOT" or something. Anything official looking I have a tendency to ignore as boilerplate, but comic sans seems like a personal friendly message directed at me

if any of the objection is to the precise letter drawings, ok fine, give me a different one, but the overall concept, I'm Comic Sans all the way.

If you want jarring so that you don’t ignore it, use Impact or Copperplate.

I completely disagree, though, you're not getting my point. There is a type of "standard" warning that I routinely ignore, the "don't cut yourself with the tablesaw" warnings. Or "knife is sharp". Like, yeah, that's why I'm using the knife.

A warning I won't ignore is one written by a friend about something unusual or unexpected. "The supposedly insulated handle on this pot will melt your fingers off"

I just think that comic sans draws my eye in, in a way that Copperplate instructions from HR do not. Don't tell HR, or they'll start using Comic Sans.

Apologies, I mixed up the font I had meant. I meant to refer to things like https://www.fontspace.com/hardsign-font-f46378, or https://www.fontspace.com/the-ranch-font-f88750, or the various Fraktur fonts that you mostly see in tattoo-art these days. These fonts are not normally used on warning signs. Unless you consider old-west "WANTED" posters to be warning signs.

These are fonts that are not just eye-catching, but actively painful to look at for how striking they are, to the point that they're even maybe a bit hard to read (but you still end up reading them, because it's hard to look away.) These are fonts that scream at you — fonts HR would never dare to use, even knowing they "work", because it'd be unprofessional to be that attention-grabbing. It'd be the typographic equivalent of blowing an airhorn in a small room in order to interrupt someone.

Or you can go the other way, and just put an actual picture of the grim reaper on your sign: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/58b3vj/stop_prevent_y... .

(Though actually, oddly enough, something about that typography makes me feel threatened even without the image. I think that particular tight leading with all-caps lettering using a high-weight sans-serif font, puts me in mind of specific public civic-engineering uses of typography to warn people away from high-voltage power substations, large AM radio transmitters, hydro-dam spillways, etc. It's a subtle thing, but it's enough to make it really not look like your standard HR print-out. See also: the old shield of the US Department of Civil Defense — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_defense_in_the_United_St.... Seeing that on something is just unsettling — for purely typographic reasons!)

I'm imagining huge Comic Sans lettering: "This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here."

100%. A cartoon with the warning helps too.

My favorite comic sans note taped to an office fridge ended with “sorry for the incontinence” and once I had a good chuckle I read the part above it that I had previously ignored.

> like a personal friendly message directed at me

Yes, like a clown talking to you while honking his nose. Amusing and ignorable.

There's nothing wrong with comic sans, if you're making a comic

You don't use it for a business letter for the same reason you don't use Times New Roman, Garamond, Baskerville, &c, for a comic.

As GP indicated, the important thing is that Comic Sans doesn't appear handwritten because it lacks variation. Just like good Calligraphy doesn't appear handwritten. In genuine (non-Calligraphic) handwriting there will be minor variations in each letter (say, the letter "s"), even though in general all instances of the letter will be more similar to each other than the same letter in someone else's handwriting.

Brush Script[1] is the ur-classic. Adobe used to give it away so it showed up literally everywhere When desktop publishing was first taking off.

[1] https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/brush-script

> I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters

Not sure what you're talking about; it did and there are many fonts that use it.

Many of the more complete font families feature stylistic alternatives for certain letters. Usually typesetting software has you manually pick them or select sets, but it could be done as you say.

Yeah, if they were the same size I'm not sure I would even notice.

You'd notice in the original screenshot/example linked: https://bouquetoftwelve.tumblr.com/post/186272155342/ommanyt...

That screenshot has the exact same problem.

No, it doesn't. Compare the heights of the 'ri' pairs, for example. In the Github repo, the difference is ginormous, the top of the 'r' is almost past the dot. In the original Tumblr mockup, the top doesn't even reach the same height as the dot. It's still too big to be subtle, but it's better.

> I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.

Why would you want that? It seems like it would be harder to read for no benefit.

Why would you want it? For the same reason as a font like Times New Bastard. For fun. For creative depression. For no good reason at all.

For a handwriting font, it would be fun to have small variations on letters. Just to make it look like something actually handwritten.

I believe it exists and here is a list of reasons for it: https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introduc...

Cool:

https://www.fontshop.com/content/enable-contextual-alternate...

You might want it for emulating handwriting by choosing glyphs from a series of fonts so that tokens like "IEEE" or "error" aren't uncanny giveaways of the computer-rendering.

>Why would you want that?

call me OCD but when I look at stuff written in script my eyes check to see if all the a's are the same, all the b's are the same, all the... and then what I see is manufactured uniformity, a communique from The Machine.

it wouldn't take much variation (say, three different a's) to make me feel a sense of relief that it's warmer and cuddlier

It would've been a neater prank if they'd actually chopped off serifs from the original letters and used those for the sans glyphes.

It gives me flashbacks of bad OCR jobs and trying to copy sensible text out of the resultant messy PDF.

How does this work? I thought ligatures were just different glyphs stored in the font that would replace some number of other individual characters. Does that mean there’s a ligature glyph for every combination of 7 characters?!

There's a whole, let's say, scripting engine that lets the font decide which glyph is going to be used that goes way further than just a simple ligature substitution. People have even implemented "games" as fonts this way: https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html

Great link, I'm impressed by the sort of animations that they were able to fit into a font.

Well, that's surprisingly addictive.

If anyone is interested I wrote a blog post about how I made fontemon and which type features I used: https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...

> Implementation for a seemingly simple logic is surprisingly powerful

hmm.

Have there been any high profile exploits of these font scripting engines?

I guess that must be where stuff like

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/bewar...

comes from.

It seems quite risky, I’m used to not downloading and executing shady programs, but downloading and executing… characters… is hard to avoid.

Windows had some security issues in the past. It has a font rendering engine in the kernel.

OpenType is basically turing-complete via glyph shaping. There's an explanation here: https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html

You get this experience the natural way still when fonts don't include a character and the specified stack doesn't have a good fallback.

I still see it on newspapers' websites when they're using a custom font and the headline contains an accented character.

Give me a font name that will offend more than 97% of the population, like !@^$-!@$!@$-!&%^!@-(*&!-BOLD.

> !@^$-!@$!@$-!&%^!@-(*&!-BOLD.

Shit, I need to change my password.

That might be valid Perl code.

who needs a font when fontconfig will gladly do this for you by default

(2019)

This is true, and I know there is sometimes such a convention. However, I can't find it in the guidelines, and I thought it better to preserve the original title as best as possible with 79 characters before someone ekse truncated the title.

the unwritten convention is let us know this is not new or an update on an old story. It's just a courtesy.

This seems to be a font where every character has a serif, but G and T do not.

The biggest problem with this is that it's too obvious, if you really want to fuck with people it should require more effort for them to tell what's wrong.

An insidious little niggle that grates upon the mind.

Maybe Times New Roman, but every seventh letter is Papyrus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ

Related: "Papyrus: The World's 2nd Most Hated Font"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t1D3ebc6h0

saw this on SNL when it originally aired, hilarious!

So something like Helvetica but every so often you sneak in Arial?

That wouldn't be bad, but I think you could do something more off-putting with something like deliberately slightly bad kerning.

I'm not sure of the extent to which you could use ligatures to tweak the serifs, rather than remove them completely (if possible - frustration will be maximised if the reader is unable to tell what's wrong, even after they come to believe that something is wrong).

Had the idea a while back to make posters and t-shirts with ‘I [heart] Helvetica’ on them, but set in Arial to wind up design nerds. But realised that 99.999% of anyone except possibly myself wouldn’t notice of care.

But it would ruin the day of anyone who did.

Isn't that just Arial?

Maybe instead it just ligatures in common typos even though you spell the word correctly:

handle becomes handel

Or strip out past tense:

fined becomes fine

Also: You're always spelled as your; Oxford commas never; Two becomes too Public becomes pubic

Note that the title of the page is not "Times New Bastard" but "weiweihuanghuang/Times-New-Bastard: It's Times New Roman but every seventh letter is jarringly sans serif", which I had edited down to "Times-New-Bastard: Times New Roman but every 7th letter is jarringly sans serif".

Now everyone knows which font to use to write passive-aggressive notices for the unknown flatmate who keeps leaving mouldy food in the fridge.

We need a font for passive aggressive HN submissions as well.

Nope. Use it for grant proposals...

Wtf

It reminds me of lawyergrams, where the language is constructed to antagonize and threaten while still being logically and legally specific and correct - a kind of ransom note with airs. I'd wonder if some white shoe firm has gone to the trouble of commissioning an in-house font based on similar design principles to this Times New Bastard, just for that purpose.

The word you used, “lawyergrams” is so niche that it shows up only in a couple places on internet and no one knows what it means, including dictionaries and ChatGPT.

I have read a great deal of fiction and I write a lot, so sometimes that means having to just make the perfect word.

not very jarring

Neat. By a strange coincidence, I made something similar yesterday in a script to make each letter in HTML into a different font. I wanted to see if it would end up as an OCR-proof font:

https://gist.github.com/tonyb486/0e3efc9240953c86a50a019b56c...

An example: https://tmp.tonybox.net/chbgr.htm

Rasterized and OCR'd: https://tmp.tonybox.net/ocr.pdf

Seems you were at least partially successful

Very cool concept

Man that Fontemon got my phone steaming hot

Sounds interesting. Mind sharing the gist (hehe) of your results?

Big fan of on-a-whim-experiments.

It would be nice if you could make the effective character sizes more uniform.

Those sans-serif spaces tho...

By god, what have you done.

A virus whose only payload is to replace times new Roman with this

that would ⓝever 𝒲ork.

This font looks like it wants to sell me some organic Cialis.

times new bararian

One can get a similar, extremely ugly effect if one is reading Japanese text rendered on a Chinese language system.

Many kanjis in the Japanese text will default to the glyphs in the system Chinese font. However, the kanas as well as some kanjis are not included in the Chinese font will be rendered with a failback font, frequently in a very different style.

Han unification was such a silly mistake

The ideal situation is there is a unified CJ(K) font that covers all the glyphs.

NotoCJK

There needs to be Latin unification too. How many times is 'a' in unicode?

> Many kanjis in the Japanese text will default to the glyphs in the system Chinese font.

There is a solution if you're using Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration/Examples...

Something similar happens when you use Spanish accent letters (á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ) with fonts that don’t include them.

It’s amazing to me that many people seem to not notice or care that random letters don’t match the font style and they keep using those fonts for Spanish.

Since this font is published under AGPL – is Times New Roman available under an open license? Or is this based on an open alternative?

Different font than TNR.

> Times New Bastard is a modified version of Nimbus Roman No. 9 L and Nimbus Sans

Reminds me of Hellvetica. Unfortunately, the website is gone, but the Internet Archive has saved us this gem:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201229053709/https://hellvetic...

This is beautiful for grating discomfort. And for over the top insanity, there's always Z̴͔̊ͤͨ̀ͅä͚̦̯̤͟l̸̤̙̰̥̝ͭ͛ģ͍̫̙̬̪̺ͯo̧̞̖ͤͪͦ͒ ̵̗͍̩͔̀ͭͪţ̪̯̘̭̤̲̰͗͒ͩͬe̢̤̙͇̘ͩ̓ͤx̷̩̤͕̺̍ͅt̩͔̪̠̞̳̟̱͂ͦ͜

Check out the old tweets from @glitchr_. You can do some wild stuff by exploiting Unicode rendering.

https://twitter.com/glitchr_

My phone doesn’t render that corr…oh

I like zalgo. It teach me a lot about Unicode. I love how diactric are coded, it is very sane, and easy golfable: https://github.com/maeln/zalgo/blob/master/golfed.c

I've got an Instagram post titled with Zalgo and it is the only one that instaload can't backup because of the resultant filename. Which amuses me greatly.

If you're looking for a download link, this appears to be the least sketchy: https://img1.allbestfonts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Hel...

The download link on the Internet Archive seemed to work as well

Keming matters!

There was a path of Exile patch note that said “fixed keming”. :)

Speaking of PoE font bugs, here's an amusing tale of how a GGG dev finally fixed a 6 years old font rendering bug:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3277814

Nice! GGG has some awesome posts on their dev process. In this case I really hope the resource manager remembered to remove the cached pointer when it unloaded the font, or (until another font is loaded at the same address) it's a use-after-free waiting to happen. :S

Hmm, that seems slightly overdone, this just looks like noise to me.

Would be much more annoying if every so often a letter was eve r so s|ightly wrong.

It looks like a cheesy movie ransom demand letter, with letter cut out of pages of magazines.

I was expecting the opposite, mostly sans-serif with the occasional serif, but the keming didn't disappoint.

Wow… this is actually impressive. It takes work to make something that’s tastefully jarring and awful.

Keming is not important.

Not dissimilar to my dyslexia.

If you want to know the science behind this then here is a good video describing the process https://youtu.be/-Y-yKmzP-4U

Reminds me of a time long gone, when I had too much free time… cool project

Reminds me of how Twitter uses an odd font for @usernames where the I and 1 and l have serifs so you can tell them apart, but is otherwise sans serif. Every time I see a username with an I in it it looks weird.

Guys don't worry just set every seventh letter to Times New Roman!

This is some massive abuse of ligatures. Did they just cover every 6 letter combination? Or do ligatures somehow get to count characters.

MY EYES

Nihilism in typography

my eyes kept telling me the e was a theta θ symbol.

Visual context really matters and seemingly small or subtle things are, well, jarring or uncomfortable. Sort of the font equivalent of the “uncanny valley”

I had remained staunchly skeptical about the domestic terrorism talk. Until now.

its a trojan horse - dont use it. AGPL license means that if you use this anywhere in your code you will need to make that code open source.

I didn’t know fonts would be capable of figuring out how many had been typed in order to swap the 7th regardless of which character it was, even with ligatures. That’s kind of crazy.

have yet to open a postscript file without it looking like this

I don’t know if it’s a thing, but I often say I have font blindness; I don’t see the difference in fonts. If I can read it, it is text and I have to really stare for ages to see what’s wrong in this case. I would happily read a book with this font and not notice anything wrong, let alone it being jarring.

Edit; same with the hellvetica example; I have to consciously stare and think to see it’s not normal; I can read it, so my brain doesn’t give two shites about the font, spacing etc.

Looks like a ransom note.

| Using it on the Web:

| text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

---

this is poetic, event potentially art

See https://github.com/Born2Root/Fast-Font for a bionic font using font features as well

It's surprisingly legible.

The developer has a great personal webpage:

https://weiweihuanghuang.github.io/

great trollin' :))

my father was a centurian, you see. his name was naughtius maximus...

I've never built a font. I had no idea you could do something procedural with them like this. I always assumed they were just a bunch of glyphs in a file.

Now we need an inverted version of this where every seventh letter of a sans serif font is jarringly serif