GoKawiil
Tech News
A Show HN project lets users create distorted, glitch-style fonts—dubbed 'bastard fonts'—that are exported as standard OpenType files. The visual distortion is achieved through contextual ligature substitutions embedded in the font file, which most browsers and design tools enable by default.
A small JavaScript library called semfont analyzes each word in a passage and automatically applies visual styling—highlighting, coloring, bolding, and italicizing—based on scores it computes for valence, salience, surprise, and certainty. These scores combine dictionary lookups with contextual rules, such as detecting negators, intensifiers, contrast words, and word rarity relative to common English and the surrounding text.
In 1932, Lebanese architect Nasri Khattar stumbled upon a way to simplify Arabic script while substituting for a typing instructor at the American University of Beirut. He discovered that using a single initial letterform instead of the correct medial one kept text legible, inspiring him to develop Unified Arabic, a system reducing Arabic's many positional and ligature variants down to 30 consistent letterforms.