2 ms·

TIL postscript has an rng in the form of the rand function. Assuming it’s widely implemented, it’d be hilarious to distribute files that replace their contents

• capitainenemo 4y ago
  Is this related? https://itnext.io/typescript-and-turing-completeness-ba8ded8f3de3?gi=86e3a90f912d https://itnext.io/typescript-and-turing-completeness-ba8ded8... I'd read this long ago, but my impression was that all the hinting stuff is auto stripped out of loaded web fonts for security/performance these days (maybe after some of those early font vulnerabilities that caused NoScript to block fonts), so most of us can't use it. That's why I was wondering if ligatures might be a reasonable hack.
  • gwern 4y ago
    You may not have an explicit rand(), but with the ligatures & substitution rules, you can add so much context sensitivity that no one will ever spot any duplications. That's how you can do things like https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_002_beta2.pdf#page=42 https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_002_beta2.pdf#p... https://aftertheflood.com/journal/the-worlds-first-code-free-sparkline-typeface/ https://aftertheflood.com/journal/the-worlds-first-code-free... https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html (most of these will work in a browser). I've also suggested that you can create 'prank fonts' which add in subtle typos sporadically. Less evilly, this is what calligraphy handwriting fonts do to get convincing variation.