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Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

brutalita.com

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Re: Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

#71

Post by xg15 »

mistercow wrote: post #11
erremerre wrote: post #3

An amazing thing, given the author is Spanish speaker I really miss the ñ Ñ. But I guess his answer is going to be, you can make those yourself!

I tried to do that, and now I’m just confused. The included glyph for the lower case n doesn’t actually fit the grid, so you can’t seem to replicate it. But also that grid doesn’t have enough resolution to do the tilde. Maybe I’m missing something?

Yeah, there are some sort of shenanigans going on in the editor. The premade letters use a finer grid than what the editor lets you work with.

It's most obvious with O, {, & and # which are impossible to draw with the grid that's presented to you.

Re: Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

#72

Post by well_actulily »

javierbyte wrote: post #64
noduerme wrote: post #56

To me the magic here is that the font used on the website text updates in realtime when you make changes to any glyph. Anyone know how that's happening, exactly?

Hey! For the real-time editor I have an invisible textarea in the background with a monospace font and I'm rendering SVGs on top of it, each character is a React component.

With heavy use of SVG , one would hope!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

Re: Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

#73

Post by m-p-3 »

javierbyte wrote: post #63

Author here! I'm so happy to see Brutalita randomly popping up on Hacker News! I had fun building this small project, there are a few fun things I did to make this work: - The editor is a textarea with a monospace font, but the text is transparent, the font is rendered on top of it using SVG of the same size and line height as the monospace font behind it. This way I didn't have to recreate a whole editor and got the…

Do you accept PR to include some accented characters, or do you prefer keeping a limited set or characters?

Re: Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

#74

Post by Vivtek »

niccl wrote: post #68
dheera wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to create a GenAI fork of this where you do one character and it tries to mimic the style for all of the others.

Douglas Hofstadter went there with his Letter Spirit project/concept/something. I can't find a decent single link about it, but there seems to have been an HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37754559

Gary McGraw was the first doctoral candidate to work on the Letter Spirit project:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220331021500/http://goosie.cog...

And John Rehling did a second portion in his doctoral work:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150320160815/https://www.cogsc...

(Thanks for this complaint - I hadn't realized that Rehling's thesis was linked from the Waybacked version of his personal page, and that finally completes my collection!)

You can also read Chapter 10 in Hofstadter's 1995 book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" for a pretty solid overview.

But yeah, seeing this project immediately reminded me of Letter Spirit, since it's basically a web editor for gridfonts.

Re: Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

#78

Post by mistercow »

dole wrote: post #18
mistercow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to do that, and now I’m just confused. The included glyph for the lower case n doesn’t actually fit the grid, so you can’t seem to replicate it. But also that grid doesn’t have enough resolution to do the tilde. Maybe I’m missing something?

Enter a N or n into the Editing box, you'll see the two grids that make the glyph up along with a blank third grid on the bottom, add a small tilde in the top two rows. Or copy and paste the actual Ñ or ñ characters into the Editing box to create it new, and you can use it immediately with the alphabet textbox on the left.

Yes, and those glyphs don’t fit the grid. Try to redraw the n from the original font yourself. You can’t, because you can’t add points between the grid dots.

Re: Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

#79

Post by aussietechguru »

nine_k wrote: post #69
javierbyte wrote: post #63

Author here! I'm so happy to see Brutalita randomly popping up on Hacker News! I had fun building this small project, there are a few fun things I did to make this work: - The editor is a textarea with a monospace font, but the text is transparent, the font is rendered on top of it using SVG of the same size and line height as the monospace font behind it. This way I didn't have to recreate a whole editor and got the…

The editor does not seem to allow to move nodes, nor does it allow to delete a node, or at least to delete the last node of a chain. This makes the editing process more like a puzzle + skill game. One wrong click, and you have to redo from start. Or put every segment on a separate map, and be good at mentally combining them. But well, it is an addictive game! :)

If you click on the last node again, it deletes it

Re: Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

#80

Post by adamddev1 »

afandian wrote: post #10

How do you edit different letters? When I opened it, 'Q' is selected but I don't see buttons to change letter?

Yes this threw me off when I first opened it. When you select the letter field you see a flashing cursor but you can't erase the character and type a new one. Instead you have to type a new character which overwrites the old "editing" character. This is confusing because it's not the behavior that the user expects when they see a flashing cursor in a text input.

I would suggest allowing people to erase the letter and type a new one in the editing field.

Once I figured out this little UI hiccup I found it absolutely delightful to play with this. What a fascinating experiment in making a font immediately editable, like a mini font-REPL. I've often been interested in (but never dabbled in) creating or editing fonts. This made that itch immediately scratchable in a raw, primitive way that unlocked something interesting in my brain.

This is a great example of what art can do.

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