I saw another post an hour ago with a similar demo and was inspired to post it here. Isn't it wonderful that browsers and laptops are so powerful nowadays?
When you download the font then it is a normal font and that does not happen. On the website, to make it possible to edit the characters in real time I'm drawing the font as SVG behind an invisible textarea; so when the text is edited really the textarea is changing and I'm drawing SVG behind every character to make it look like a textarea with the custom font. I'm curious which browser/OS are you using since I don't see the textarea text when I highlight something.
I feel cozy and delicious using the coordinates! I already had a clock renderer (see LEDaliClock video) in which each character had exactly 8 points in a loop, drawing 9 lines, and I lerp'd those coordinates to morph the characters. I dropped those constraints and added the extra loop over your multiple sections and it just worked.
You can link the video as long as you promise to accept my PR when I make a better one. That was made at 01:30 after 4h of hacking and I'm going to make a new one with a tripod and better exposure once I'm happy with the code. Interestingly, any still frame looks terrible and slightly unreadable, but at 30fps with fractional coordinates and antialiased lines, the moving image looks great! Hooray for the persistence of vision!
FWIW: 1h for 25 lines of Ruby, because I forgot how to Ruby. 1h for updating to my latest framebuffer code and drawing your character format, 1h for a stupid bug (as always!), and 1h tweaking the curvy projection and other effects.
Sounds so good! That is a feature that I want to implement, when I was making the font I wanted the same feature (but decided to finish the font first!) so what I end up doing was using a different character to create a variation of a char and then replacing the coordinates in the JSON file later.
If you open the editor on a bigger window (I think I made it 1000px or more) you'll get the "full" editor with the dots that you are missing. I may make it an option so you can get the full editor on mobile too.
And yes, more points and different aspect ratio would be nice, currently the `textarea` works by having a native textarea invisible on top of the SVG render, and tuning it to be in sync was a bit hard. So I think I can make custom grids and ratios happen but I'll have to disable the textarea for them, no big deal I guess :)
Shrinking the window and expanding it again sometimes makes the smaller dots disappear from the full-sized editor, but not every time. I'll let you debug that :)
1. Noted, the buttons are confusing. In the meantime: "download" downloads the original font that I made, "download edited" download currently edited font (if you have made any edits) in .otf format, "download json" downloads each char definition as coordinates, and "restore json" lets you restore a previously edited json so you can keep editing your font. Everything happens locally, there are no servers.
2. Yep
3. Do you have something in mind? :)
Hello HN! I wanted to make a font that I can "snap" to vertices on a grid for an upcoming project, and after starting making it I decided that it was going to be easier to iterate if I made an editor too. It uses opentype.js to generate the font and some invisible textarea tricks combined with svg for the text editor.
It took me a second to realize what I was looking at, but this is a very cool toy to play with.
When I click the same bubble twice in a row it clears the entire field of bubbles. Is this intended behavior? Seems like I should be able to undo a click that I've made. Using Firefox on MacOS.
Unfortunately the side effect is that some emojis, live the gorilla, are only a head in my font. Still, it's cute, despite the weird scales (your mouth is 12cm??)
