Times New Bastard

https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/Times-New-Bastard

by orhmeh09 • 3 years ago

527 131 3 years ago

graypegg• 3 years ago

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?!

seba_dos13• 3 years ago

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 simple ligature substitution. People have even implemented "games" as fonts this way: https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html

skeaker• 3 years ago

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

RobotToaster2• 3 years ago

Well, that's surprisingly addictive.

mmulet• 3 years ago

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...

avgcorrection• 3 years ago

Implementation for a seemingly simple logic is surprisingly powerful

hmm.

bee_rider• 3 years ago

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.

epilys• 3 years ago

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

fsckboy4• 3 years ago

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.

frostburg• 3 years ago

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.

seba_dos13• 3 years ago

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.

Blahah• 3 years ago

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....

augustk• 3 years ago

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.

Jeff_Brown• 3 years ago

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

gwern2• 3 years ago

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

mywittyname• 3 years ago

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.

KerrAvon• 3 years ago

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."

RobotToaster2• 3 years ago

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.

anonymouskimmer• 3 years ago

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.

User23• 3 years ago

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

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

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.

true_religion• 3 years ago

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.

wishfish• 3 years ago

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

esquivalience• 3 years ago

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

elevation• 3 years ago

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.

fsckboy4• 3 years ago

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

huhtenberg• 3 years ago

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.

ryanjshaw• 3 years ago

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

zerocrates• 3 years ago

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.

ForOldHack• 3 years ago

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

Sohcahtoa82• 3 years ago

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

Shit, I need to change my password.

anthk• 3 years ago

That might be valid Perl code.

arrakeen• 3 years ago

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

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

(2019)

orhmeh092• 3 years ago

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.

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

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

m4632• 3 years ago

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

yarg3• 3 years ago

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.

omoikane• 3 years ago

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

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

SeenNotHeard• 3 years ago

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

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

computerdork• 3 years ago

saw this on SNL when it originally aired, hilarious!

mc32• 3 years ago

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

yarg3• 3 years ago

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).

pessimizer• 3 years ago

Isn't that just Arial?

chrisco255• 3 years ago

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

orhmeh092• 3 years ago

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".

globalise83• 3 years ago

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

bezier-curve• 3 years ago

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

fghorow• 3 years ago

Nope. Use it for grant proposals...

motohagiography2• 3 years ago

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.

Aerbil313• 3 years ago

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.

motohagiography2• 3 years ago

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

gjvc• 3 years ago

not very jarring

bonyt• 3 years ago

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

jredwards2• 3 years ago

Seems you were at least partially successful

tailspin2019• 3 years ago

Very cool concept

toxik• 3 years ago

Man that Fontemon got my phone steaming hot

yscodes• 3 years ago

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

Big fan of on-a-whim-experiments.

einpoklum• 3 years ago

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

chavesn• 3 years ago

Those sans-serif spaces tho...

nunez• 3 years ago

By god, what have you done.

cyanydeez• 3 years ago

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

m4632• 3 years ago

that would ⓝever 𝒲ork.

Tao3300• 3 years ago

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

naikrovek• 3 years ago

times new bararian

qwezxcrty2• 3 years ago

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.

bobbylarrybobby• 3 years ago

Han unification was such a silly mistake

qwezxcrty2• 3 years ago

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

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 3 years ago

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

1una• 3 years ago

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...

elboru• 3 years ago

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.

mfsch• 3 years ago

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

xoxxala• 3 years ago

Different font than TNR.

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

ybc37• 3 years ago

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...

jredwards2• 3 years ago

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

nradov• 3 years ago

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

https://twitter.com/glitchr_

anthomtb• 3 years ago

My phone doesn’t render that corr…oh

maeln• 3 years ago

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

zimpenfish• 3 years ago

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.

jkingsman• 3 years ago

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...

zubairshaik• 3 years ago

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

yafbum• 3 years ago

Keming matters!

taneq2• 3 years ago

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

contravariant• 3 years ago

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.

lostlogin• 3 years ago

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

userbinator• 3 years ago

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

lambdasquirrel• 3 years ago

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

Hamuko• 3 years ago

Keming is not important.

account-5• 3 years ago

Not dissimilar to my dyslexia.

forgotusername6• 3 years ago

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

neverrroot• 3 years ago

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

Pxtl• 3 years ago

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.

91Jacob• 3 years ago

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

Aeolun• 3 years ago

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

Ruq• 3 years ago

MY EYES

richardanaya• 3 years ago

Nihilism in typography

ineedasername• 3 years ago

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”

smitty1e• 3 years ago

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

anonu• 3 years ago

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.

lloydatkinson• 3 years ago

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.

awinter-py• 3 years ago

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

anonzzzies• 3 years ago

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.

bdg• 3 years ago

Looks like a ransom note.

tariqrauf• 3 years ago

| Using it on the Web:

| text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

---

this is poetic, event potentially art

birb07• 3 years ago

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

z3t4• 3 years ago

It's surprisingly legible.

contrarian1234• 3 years ago

The developer has a great personal webpage:

https://weiweihuanghuang.github.io/

great trollin' :))

shreyshnaccount• 3 years ago

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

DubiousPusher• 3 years ago

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.

snprajwal• 3 years ago

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

Times New Bastard

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