3 ms·

How does this work? I thought ligatures were just different glyphs stored in the font that would replace some number of other individual characters. Does that m

How does this work? I thought ligatures were just different glyphs stored in the font that would replace some number of other individual characters. Does that mean there’s a ligature glyph for every combination of 7 characters?!

seba_dos1 3y ago
There's a whole, let's say, scripting engine that lets the font decide which glyph is going to be used that goes way further than just simple ligature substitution. People have even implemented "games" as fonts this way: https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
- skeaker 3y ago
  Great link, I'm impressed by the sort of animations that they were able to fit into a font.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  Well, that's surprisingly addictive.
- mmulet 3y ago
  If anyone is interested I wrote a blog post about how I made fontemon and which type features I used: https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowIDidIt.md https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  > Implementation for a seemingly simple logic is surprisingly powerful hmm.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Have there been any high profile exploits of these font scripting engines? I guess that must be where stuff like https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/beware-of-the-text-message-that-crashes-iphones/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/bewar... comes from. It seems quite risky, I’m used to not downloading and executing shady programs, but downloading and executing… characters… is hard to avoid.
  - josefx 3y ago
    Windows had some security issues in the past. It has a font rendering engine in the kernel.
epilys 3y ago
OpenType is basically turing-complete via glyph shaping. There's an explanation here: https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html

seba_dos1 3y ago

There's a whole, let's say, scripting engine that lets the font decide which glyph is going to be used that goes way further than just simple ligature substitution. People have even implemented "games" as fonts this way: https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html

skeaker 3y ago
Great link, I'm impressed by the sort of animations that they were able to fit into a font.
RobotToaster 3y ago
Well, that's surprisingly addictive.
mmulet 3y ago
If anyone is interested I wrote a blog post about how I made fontemon and which type features I used: https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowIDidIt.md https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...
avgcorrection 3y ago
> Implementation for a seemingly simple logic is surprisingly powerful hmm.
bee_rider 3y ago
Have there been any high profile exploits of these font scripting engines? I guess that must be where stuff like https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/beware-of-the-text-message-that-crashes-iphones/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/bewar... comes from. It seems quite risky, I’m used to not downloading and executing shady programs, but downloading and executing… characters… is hard to avoid.
- josefx 3y ago
  Windows had some security issues in the past. It has a font rendering engine in the kernel.

epilys 3y ago

OpenType is basically turing-complete via glyph shaping. There's an explanation here: https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html