
Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures (2015) - JoshTriplett
https://pixelambacht.nl/2015/sans-bullshit-sans/
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tribby
this is great. at the last stupid hackathon in SF I worked on a font for cats
with over 7 million ligatures (every fourth letter, it turns what you just
typed into "meow.")[1] it was tricky to figure out how to push ranges and
named lookups to the limit, and there doesn't seem to be any getting around
the speed issue, but there's a lot of underlying font tech to have fun with :)

1\. [https://github.com/jpt/meow](https://github.com/jpt/meow)

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grenoire
Love it! Also, "Fun fact: the well known ampersand, &, was originally a
ligature for “et”, meaning “and” in Latin," completely amazed me. I never
knew.

~~~
0x0
The "et" -> "&" lineage is even more visible in certain fonts like this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trebuchet_MS_ampersand.sv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trebuchet_MS_ampersand.svg)
(linked from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand)
)

~~~
amyjess
The bottom row of this has some more examples:
[http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/wp/wp-
content/uploads/2011/...](http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/wp/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/roman-italic-ampersands.png) (found via Google Image
Search for _italic ampersand_ ).

The one in the second column from the left (again, bottom row) is how I write
my ampersands by hand.

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keithpeter
Nice teaching framework: I've painlessly absorbed a little bit of information
about how fonts work while going along with the joke.

~~~
JoshTriplett
That's what I liked about this as well; not like you'd actually use the font,
but in the process, it walks through how ligatures work in modern font
formats.

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chris_wot
Behad Esfahbod is, quite frankly, a font and script genius. When I was delving
into understanding LibreOffice's font and layout mess (which is getting
better, btw) I kept seeing his name and work in harfbuzz.

The world, I feel, owes this man a great debt and I fear he is one of the
great unsung open source heroes we seem to hear so little about!

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jancsika
Immediately looked to see whether the substitution language is Turing
complete. Luckily, it appears not.

Seems like you could do some very quirky animation using ligatures. For
example-- imagine that the ligature for "Im" tilts the "I" toward the "m".
Then the ligature for "Imm" tilts the "I" further, and so on, until I type the
complete word "Immediately" and the "I" has drifted down below the "y"
character.

Repeat this drift for each subsequent letter typed, slowly increasing the
amount of displacement for the letters in the ligatures. Then, by the time
I've finished typing this comment, all the letters would end up piled up in
the corner of this textarea. :)

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Sephr
I was experimenting with this concept in 2012, and I think this is still
relevant today. I wanted to make a web font with ligatures that replaced
popular company names with their actual company logos.

It ended up being way too much work, and it isn't monetizeable due to the
copyrighted nature of many logos.

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grimgrin
Here's a font with programming related ligatures:

[https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode/blob/master/README.md)

~~~
simongray
Started using this in Cursive. Works pretty great for Clojure and other
symbol-heavy languages, presumably.

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woogiewonka
Is there a chrome extension that will apply this treatment to current websites
so we can see which ones are full of BS?

