June 20th, 2024

Font as Tetris [video]

The video discusses font evolution from clay tablets to digital fonts, covering styles, typography progress, ligatures, OTF and TTF formats. It mentions Metafont, hinting techniques, and Half Bus C++ library integration.

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Font as Tetris [video]

The YouTube video delves into the evolution of fonts and typefaces, tracing their history from ancient clay tablets to contemporary computer fonts. It explores the creation of distinct font styles, the progression of typography, the incorporation of ligatures, and the emergence of font formats such as OTF and TTF. The content also touches on Metafont programming languages, screen scaling hinting techniques, and the integration of the Half Bus C++ library in software applications like Chrome.

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By @erk__ - 4 months
Author here if there is any questions.

Source code: https://github.com/Erk-/programmable-fonts

You can also see actual uses of this WebAssembly embedding to show that is not just for fun here: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples

By @HanClinto - 4 months
This is seriously impressive!!

It reminds me of the way that speedruns and game replays are saved as deterministic timings of inputs -- almost like DOOM demofiles, except much more reasonable to track.

I like your idea of a Gameboy Emulator! Game of Life also feels like it would be possible in this structure, but I think Tetris is absolutely perfect. Top notch!!

What's the easiest way to play with this ourselves? Would be great if this font could be loaded on a webpage for us to play with interactively, but not sure how difficult that would be.

By @dang - 4 months
Related ongoing thread:

Tetris Font - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737294