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Hey, computer, make me a font

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Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#31

Post by simbolit »

boffinAudio wrote: post #7

I've long had a project in mind involving the various typefaces of the signage around the city of Vienna, which I find very inspiring in many cases. The idea is to just take a picture of every different typeface I can find, attached to the local buildings at street level. There are some truly wonderful typefaces out there, on signage dating back to last century, and I find the aesthetics often quite appealing. With t…

With this tool: no.

With a next-gen tool: if you do some pre-processing on the images, quite possibly.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#32

Post by simbolit »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #30
simbolit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but the answer is "no". What exactly made you suspect such abilities?

Odd phrasing, but: the part where I've worked on OpenType parsing for decades and love seeing people with a passion for digital typefaces make new and creative tools in that space. Typically folks don't stop working on a cool tool after they write a blog post, they're still refining and extending, so you never know how far someone is trying to take a tool without asking them.

So, if I understand you correctly, it was less a question "does it do x?" and more an indirect form of "hey OP, would be cool if it did X" ?

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#33

Post by TheRealPomax »

PaulHoule wrote: post #12

Kinda funny how it works well at this whereas diffusion models go to die when it comes to drawing text but of course it works in a completely different manner.

There's a huge difference between "pictures of letters" and "writing text" though. Ask stable diffusion to write text and it'll generate hilarious weird-looking results. But, ask it to generate individual letters (e.g. "Show me an ornate uppercase letter b") and it'll do that for you with (mostly) no problems.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#34

Post by TheRealPomax »

simbolit wrote: post #32
TheRealPomax wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd phrasing, but: the part where I've worked on OpenType parsing for decades and love seeing people with a passion for digital typefaces make new and creative tools in that space. Typically folks don't stop working on a cool tool after they write a blog post, they're still refining and extending, so you never know how far someone is trying to take a tool without asking them.

So, if I understand you correctly, it was less a question "does it do x?" and more an indirect form of "hey OP, would be cool if it did X" ?

This is not the place for starting a discussion about whether context and subtext should be implicit or explicit in written English. That's what https://philosophy.stackexchange.com is for.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#35

Post by logicallee »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #17

I found a few months ago that the gpt-4 code interpreter is capable of converting a black and white png of a glyph to an svg https://twitter.com/lfegray/status/1678787763905126400 It would be cool to combine a script like the one gpt-4 gave me with an image generation model to generate fonts. The approach from this blog post is way more interesting though. On a separate note it reminds me of this suckerpinch video :)…

>I found a few months ago that the gpt-4 code interpreter is capable of converting a black and white png of a glyph to an svg

:) Easy there, let's not make all the naysayers who say it only just predicts plausible words sweat.

Your phrasing almost makes it sound like you're sharing a clear example of it analyzing and completing a complex task correctly, while perfectly understanding what it's doing.

Perhaps we should say it only just predicted words that are plausible responses to someone asking to do that, while also predicting plausible words someone might say in response to an error message along the way. It might not actually be doing any converting, just predicting words and tokens without really doing anything.

My favorite part of its predictive capabilities is how it is able to predict the other half of a conversation that literally goes "didn't work, try again", "didn't work, try again", "still didn't work, try again", "all right you finally fixed it good job" - without even telling it why it didn't work or quoting the error message. Somehow it is still able to predict the other half of the conversation so that it ends up with "finally, good job!"

Who knew that to get results that look like it knows what it's doing, it's enough to predict what could make someone say that!

We are truly living in the golden age of statistical prediction that does not involve any degree of thinking, analysis, or understanding.

Truly our age of applied statistics is going better than anyone could have, er, "predicted". :)

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#36

Post by bambax »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #17

I found a few months ago that the gpt-4 code interpreter is capable of converting a black and white png of a glyph to an svg https://twitter.com/lfegray/status/1678787763905126400 It would be cool to combine a script like the one gpt-4 gave me with an image generation model to generate fonts. The approach from this blog post is way more interesting though. On a separate note it reminds me of this suckerpinch video :)…

The author says he achieved text-to-SVG generation but doesn't point to a code repository for it... It would be super interesting (or does gpt-4 do it natively?)

That said, I'm not sure that you need GPT-4 for outlining a BW image and making a path out of it; Corel Draw did that well, over 25 years ago?

So yes, another approach to what the author is doing, would be to generate font bitmaps using any of the leading image generators, and then vectorize the bitmaps. Less straightforward and precise, but probably simpler.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#37

Post by omneity »

artursapek wrote: post #23
7moritz7 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't seen a single maliscious ckpt file so far. Sure, there is a possibility, but huggingface scans pickled weights automatically so the likelihood of someone using that site to spread malware in this form is super low

“pickled weights”? serious question, how on Earth should someone like me, who has completely missed the last 12 months of AI development, catch up with the state of the art?

Two separate terms here, pickling is a serialization method for Python objects (unrelated to AI per se).

Read more here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html

Then "weights" is just referring to a model's weights, a specific instance of a python object that can be pickled.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#38

Post by jddj »

ballenf wrote: post #28
philipwhiuk wrote: post #18

> To train the model, I assembled a dataset of 71k distinct fonts. I give it a week before Monotype sues your face off.

Copyright around fonts may not support such a suit in the same as way as works of art. Wikipedia says: "In the United States, the shapes of typefaces are not eligible for copyright but may be protected by design patent (although it is rarely applied for, the first US design patent that was ever awarded was for a typeface).[1]" So just scanning the rendered font (as opposed to the code that generates it), may be harde…

> may be harder to stop than scanning of artwork.

Which has not been particularly easy to stop either

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