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Hey, computer, make me a font

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Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#91

Post by duskwuff »

alana314 wrote: post #45
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 :)…

That's amazing. One of my favorite things to do with copilot is to comment something like "//white arrow pointing right" and then start "<svg" and have it complete it. If it doesn't get it right the first time I update my comment. Saves me time searching for the right SVG and digging through free but really paid image sites.

> Saves me time searching for the right SVG and digging through free but really paid image sites.

FWIW, Google's Material Design Icons and The Noun Project are decent sources of high quality, actually-free SVG icons:

* https://fonts.google.com/icons (Apache license)

* https://thenounproject.com/ (CC-BY)

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#92

Post by nvy »

rogerclark wrote: post #61
colesantiago wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore. Why does this sadden you? I'm quite happy everything is being done by AI, time will be freed for other things that are more important. Manual font making will not go away though and now anyone can make their own fonts for free.

You don't know that the time will be freed for other things that are more important. We don't know for sure how this is all going to work out at all. And people who make fonts, create art, and write prose generally do these things because they like doing them, not because they're forced to. These technologies aren't automating drudgery, they're automating things that give people's lives meaning. What's the endgame he…

>What's the endgame here exactly?

All of us paying a set of subscriptions to the FAANGs, for literally every aspect of our lives.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#93

Post by ori_b »

colesantiago wrote: post #58
gigglesupstairs wrote: post #52

"Fucking Hell" - first thing I yelled to myself when I saw that headline Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore.

> Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore. Why does this sadden you? I'm quite happy everything is being done by AI, time will be freed for other things that are more important. Manual font making will not go away though and now anyone can make their own fonts for free.

Genuine question: What do you think is more important that won't eventually be done with AI?

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#94

Post by ori_b »

axus wrote: post #72
rogerclark wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creatives will have their hopes and dreams stripped away so that artless and tasteless software engineers can type words into a box and instantly get exactly what they want, with no surprises, no feelings, and no economic upsides for anyone else. A beautiful future indeed.

Won't the creatives be able to type the software specification into a box, and add functionality to their endeavor without needing programmers? I'm not sure that the process and the paycheck are more important than the final artifact.

Why would we need people to have endeavors? That sounds like automatable drudgery.

Won't the AIs be able to infer what would best maximize engagement for their owners and type the specifications necessary to create whatever the entity running them would want their users to consume?

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#95

Post by morph12 »

ori_b wrote: post #94
axus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't the creatives be able to type the software specification into a box, and add functionality to their endeavor without needing programmers? I'm not sure that the process and the paycheck are more important than the final artifact.

Why would we need people to have endeavors? That sounds like automatable drudgery. Won't the AIs be able to infer what would best maximize engagement for their owners and type the specifications necessary to create whatever the entity running them would want their users to consume?

Why would we need people? Seems like a pointless bottleneck in the pursuit of efficiency.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#96

Post by tpmoney »

rogerclark wrote: post #59
gigglesupstairs wrote: post #52

"Fucking Hell" - first thing I yelled to myself when I saw that headline Kudos for the project, of course, but it just saddens me a bit more. Nothing is sacred anymore.

It's so depressing to think that this is what people want.

What is that? The ability to quickly and easily generate creative or expressive pieces of computer wizardry without first having to delve into the depths of esoteric knowledge? Of course people want that. It turns out you can’t specialize in everything, but sometimes you just want to be able to make something good enough without having to engage the services of an expert in the field.

No this might not be the most beautiful font with the most perfect kerning or optimized code. But if it’s functional enough for the person who requests it, that should be good enough shouldn’t it? Most things people are printing on their 3d printers aren’t high quality designed parts either. Plenty of scientists and accountants have scripts and code that would make most developers cringe, but if it’s good enough then why be bothered?

The ability of people to make things with tools that they otherwise never would have been able to make before without dedicating months or years of time they may not have is awesome and we should be excited for it. I’ve watched 70 year old grandmothers learn to make little home movies of their grandkids in iMovie. No they weren’t doing “real” film editing and certainly weren’t learning any skills that would transfer to avid or Final Cut. And so what? That home movie cut together with a minimum of skill and a whole lot of technology hiding the esoterica was probably more meaningful and joy inducing for that woman than most blockbuster cinematics produced by the best minds.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#97

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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.

That's why it's so important for the weights to be released to the public ASAP. Even when the original is sued, they can still be passed around in torrents for hobbyists and third-world businessmen to enjoy.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#98

Post by BeFlatXIII »

rogerclark wrote: post #68
colesantiago wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time will be freed, ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has collectively saved countless people billions of hours of time and this will do the same. The big font makers no longer have a hold on extremely pricey fonts that are inaccessible, the general endgame is most software is going free and open source thanks to AI, and that is a good thing.

Creatives will have their hopes and dreams stripped away so that artless and tasteless software engineers can type words into a box and instantly get exactly what they want, with no surprises, no feelings, and no economic upsides for anyone else. A beautiful future indeed.

Designing cereal boxes is not authentic human experssion.

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#99

Post by svat »

gwern wrote: post #69
martincmartin wrote: post #55

Douglas Hofstader, the author of Godel Escher Bach, thought the task of creating fonts could only be solved with general AI. https://www.m-u-l-t-i-p-l-i-c-i-t-y.org/media/pdf/Metafont-M... The Letter Spirit project aims to model artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid).

I read that a while ago and thought that it was interesting: Hofstadter was right that it would require much more general approaches than Knuth's approach of 'think very hard and tweak a hand-engineered knob', because that's how all the past VAE/GAN/RNN work on typography-related stuff has worked. As for the broader question of whether such approaches are general AI, well, that's a bullet Hofstadter is increasingly w…

Hofstadter's article is very interesting and delightful (as is typical of him). But as a response to Knuth's article it's basically reacting to a straw-man or misunderstanding: by "a metafont" in "The Concept of a Meta-Font"[1] Knuth simply meant a common description of many related fonts in a family (like the Computer Modern family where different font sizes, bold, italics, sans-serif, typewriter style etc are all generated from common code and tweakable knobs) — this is a consciously chosen and designed family. But when he joked about

> The idea of a meta-font should now be clear. But what good is it? The ability to manipulate lots of parameters may be interesting and fun, but does anybody really need a 6⅐-point font that is one fourth of the way between Baskerville and Helvetica?

Hofstadter ran with it, imagining Knuth to mean a single universal "metafont" from which every single font can be achieved by suitable tweaking of knobs. This is of course nonsense.

Knuth wrote a (little-known or referenced) short response in the same journal's Vol. 17 No. 4 (1983): Volume 17.4 (p 412, or in the PDF page 89 of 96 at https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/issue/view/364/183) [from the tone I imagine him very annoyed :-)]:

> I never meant to imply that all typefaces could usefully be combined into one single meta-font, not even if consideration is restricted to book faces. For example, […] Meanwhile, I'm pleased to see that my article has stimulated people to have other ideas, even if those ideas have little or no connection with the main point I was trying to make. Misunderstandings of meta-fonts may well prove to be more important than my own simple observations in the long run.

Returning to the thread a bit, all these “write code to draw an image” systems—like Metafont/MetaPost, Asymptote, TikZ (and also I guess DOT/Graphviz, Mermaid, nomnoml, …)—are IMO interesting as a way for those who think in language / symbols / concepts to do visual stuff (and vice-versa to some extent), and also (along Knuth's lines) “truly understand” shapes by translating them into precise descriptions. Metafont was never going to become popular expecting font designers to write code (and the fact that hand-writing SVG is a negligible fraction of usage makes sense), but now that LLMs can help translate back-and-forth, it's going to be interesting to see if we ever get to “understanding” shapes.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220629082019/https://s3-us-wes... / https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/vl/article/view/5329/4193

Re: Hey, computer, make me a font

#100

Post by SerCe »

bambax wrote: post #36
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 im…

Hi, I am the author. For text-to-SVG, check out IconShop [1]. It was the paper that I tried to reproduce results from initially. In the paper, there is a comparison of their approach against using GPT-4 [2].

Using vectorisation tools like potrace, is indeed a much more popular approach, and there are quite a few papers generating fonts this way. The most recent I believe is DualVector [3]. But I tried to approach the problem from another angle.

[1]: https://icon-shop.github.io

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.14400.pdf

[3]: https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/CVPR2023/html/Liu_Dual...

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