
Apple-sans-adjectives – A font that redacts Apple-esque superlatives from text - slurpp
http://appleadjectiv.es/
======
btrask
Ran across this recently:

> Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare puts storytelling in a narrative. Infinity
> Ward breaks ground by exploring weight and its responsibilities. In a time
> of adversity, the player, as Captain of their warship, must take command
> against an enemy. Soldiers are thrust into circumstances that will test
> their training and reveal their character as they learn to lead and make
> decisions necessary to achieve victory. The game also introduces
> environments, weaponry and abilities to Call of Duty. The campaign – from
> combat to fighters – occurs as an experience with loading times and delivers
> franchise moments that fans love.

[https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/05/02/call-of-duty-
inf...](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/05/02/call-of-duty-infinite-
warfare-announced/#comment-2195269)

~~~
sago
I'd love to hear a 'honest trailers' style reading of things like this:

"Marketing Copy without the Marketing Wank"

\- I think that example couple be better in a few places, but it is
instructive how little actual content it contains, and how none of that
content is at all informative.

~~~
roymurdock
A young author named Tao Lin uses this "transparent" style to write fiction. I
haven't read any of his stuff because it seems like such a tedious, vapid way
to write a story, but check out some of the reviews on his book Richard Yates
on Amazon:

 _I read 'Richard Yates' on a work night in the beginning of the week alone in
my room. I had heard that 'Richard Yates' was a true account by the author,
which was primarily my motivation to read it. I had only ever read
'Shoplifting' prior to reading 'Richard Yates.'

The content made me feel, at first, shame and resentment for my own teenage
mistakes. I also felt uneasy and inadequate that I didn't find it as humorous
as other people did. So, at first, I felt negatively towards `Richard Yates,'
as it made me feel poorly.

I didn't want my initial reaction and past experiences to shape my opinion of
the book. After a week's worth of thought, I realized that I had received
exactly what I wanted from `Richard Yates;' a literal retelling of events from
a narrator unmotivated and unconcerned with my or anyone else's opinion of
them. Behind the seemingly fake method of building a familiar brand is a
product that is unusually authentic. It is likeable at times and unlikable
other times. The book satisfied my curiosity about the author's life. This
thought made me feel calm about the book. Things that I perceive to be
authentic make me feel good about society and culture. I feel good. Thank you
for `Richard Yates.'_

[https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Yates-Novel-Tao-
Lin/dp/193555...](https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Yates-Novel-Tao-
Lin/dp/1935554158?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc)

------
IkmoIkmo
Fun idea but poorly executed. Even the first of the two examples they have on
the website starts with 'every once in a while', redacting 'very' in 'every'
for no reason, rendering the font unusable for most intents and purposes.

~~~
vinceguidry
Fonts have a feature called ligatures, where you can take two or more letters
and turn them into one glyph. You usually use them to improve readability but
since there aren't any rules around what the 'combined' glyph looks like,
people sometimes do things like change all instances of one word with another.
In this case they're blacking out certain words.

It's really a job for natural language parsing, but the effort is commendable.

------
johncolanduoni
This is ingenious!

If anybody is curious at to how this works, they use a feature in OpenType
(the most common format for modern fonts and the basis for WOFF and EOT)
called _glyph substitution_. It's designed to combine adjacent characters for
ligatures and the like. It lets you specify that some arrangement of
characters should be replaced by an alternate glyph.

~~~
Svip
A more interesting usage of this feature is Hasklig:
[https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/](https://github.com/i-tu/Hasklig/)

A monospaced fontface for Haskell, where the operators are presented as
ligatures. If only it also included operators from other languages.

~~~
whoopdedo
I'd like ligatures in coding fonts more if they also collapsed to a single (or
double at most) character cell.

~~~
pklausler
You must be too young to have used APL.

------
Piskvorrr
Cute. Especially with the clbuttic mistake apparent in the "famous speeches"
section ("E••••thing", "b•••••ness" etc)

~~~
unwind
[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clbuttic](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clbuttic)
for those who missed that reference. And I agree, kind of a fail on the
attention to detail front, which is suprising for a project like this.

~~~
mikeash
By far my favorite example of this is the term "buttbuttination." If you dive
deeply enough into the Google results, you'll start to find some actual
accidental uses of the term rather than just discussion of the phenomenon of
text substitution. There's something darkly hilarious about a web site
seriously discussing something like "260 hours of recordings that JFK secretly
made in the days before his buttbuttination in Dallas."

------
nsxwolf
The very first example shows "We think you're really going to love this"
change into "We think you're going to this".

That's literally the first thing they wanted us to see. It took a sentence and
broke it and rendered it meaningless. If it had only removed the "really",
that would have been one thing.

~~~
benjaminl
The sentence was already meaningless. It didn't break the sentence but
revealed that it was already broken.

~~~
prewett
How is the original sentence meaningless? "We think you will like this"
(rephrasing) definitely has a meaning. You have probably said something
similar when you are recommending something.

Whereas their version actually changes the meaning. It changes the verb from
liking a lot to physically changing location. (And to be pedantic, "really" is
an adverb, not an adjective, so it is outside the scope of the name of the
font.)

It is a cool hack, although, I expect this idea could be put to all sorts of
nefarious uses.

~~~
terminus
> How is the original sentence meaningless? "We think you will like this"
> (rephrasing) definitely has a meaning.

The original sentence is meaningless because it's marketing drivel. In a sales
context, this is literally the only thing they can say.

Thus in an information theoretic sense the "We think you will love this" (the
original phrasing) conveys exactly zero additional information besides what
can be gleaned from the identity of the speaker.

------
jarnix
It's not only "adjectives", also the word "revolution" was not masked too.
"It's a revolution" are the first words that come to my mind when I think
about Apple ;)

~~~
andrewgleave
Came here to say the same thing. 'revolutionise' was the third word I typed.

------
LoSboccacc
previously -
[http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/](http://www.sansbullshitsans.com/)

------
flopto
This is cute. How could you pick e.g. Google-esque adjectives?

Is there a corpus of press releases, etc. from lots of big (tech) companies?
If so, has anyone done basic comparative word/n-gram frequency analysis of it?

~~~
kristopolous
Yes. This stuff is hard and subjective because you need to agree on a
baseline...

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nicky0
It's described as "sans adjectives" but in the demo it removes only an adverb
(really) and a verb (love).

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syntiux
This is the most exiting and innovative product we've ever created.

Very creative use of glyph substitution though. :)

------
adamsch
On which planet is "to love" an adjective?

~~~
Bromskloss
And why does the title talk about superlatives?

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heqleriq
We think you're really going to love this. Love is redacted, and is not an
adjective, it is a verb.

If the intent was to reduce hyperbole then love should be replaced with
appreciate or like. Otherwise this makes text unreadable rather than stripped
of superlative.

------
foobarge
Doesn't handle "insanely"

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Nor “insanely great”. Is this a font for the post-Jobs era?

------
danra
For 'wonderfully', only the 'wonderful' part is redacted, so you get
'\---------ly'. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature :)

------
owenversteeg
Here are some of the words it redacts:

beautiful right very love great exciting really

I'm curious what others there are. Also, interesting to see the Scunthorpe
problem poke its head up here, with "e----" instead of "every" for example, as
the font cannot detect context since it uses glyph substitution, which was
designed for ligatures.

~~~
mikeash
Does this mean that we can do cloud-to-butt as a _font?_

A whole new universe of possibilities has just opened up....

------
ameesdotme
I made a replicate of the iPhone announcement poster they made, but without
the black-censors and timestamps.

[https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxdt7NWvLqR9Z1J3U1BIQkxfbG...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxdt7NWvLqR9Z1J3U1BIQkxfbGc)

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sarreph
Please add 'blazing', 'light-speed', and 'turbo' to your dictionary ;)

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Angostura
Tragically, it doesn't redact the most of Jobsian of words 'Boom!'

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verytrivial
I can't seem to get anything to redact. "amazing perfect outstanding beautiful
gorgeous" all show fine. (Chrome 48, Win7, in corporate lock-down which might
be causing it.)

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lake99
If the author is reading this, I wish he'd do this for copy-pasted text too. I
tried pasting some text from Apple's website, and it did nothing.

~~~
hacksonx
Ctrl+shift+v maybe?

~~~
lake99
That didn't work either. Apparently, it has something to do with Tor Browser,
where it didn't work although I enabled JS. Pasting worked fine on another
browser.

------
sleepychu
E[s]very[/s] place, even mid-word!

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bbcbasic
Nothing redacted on android chrome

------
kevan
I'm a little disappointed that "automagically" wasn't recognized.

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paulus_magnus2
this reminds me of an old idea I had: a TL;DR; for books. Initially humans
would mark sentences / phrases as superfluous (later a bot / AI would do
that). You'd be able to view the book in various levels of verbosity.

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emodendroket
It should probably at least look at word boundaries.

------
andrewclunn
Is this working for everyone else? I typed in, "Amazing new innovation that
will revolutionize the way you work." And nothing happened.

Edit

On silk browser on kindle fire.

~~~
dave2000
Works on my Kindle Fire 7 but I didn't like the fact I couldn't install
Firefox on it - indeed, no Play Store - so I installed Cyanogenmod and
everything's been great ever since!

------
tunnuz
This is brilliant :D

