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Teranoptia – a typeface that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures
- semireg 2y agoMe and the 6 year old have been making Pokémon cards and generating AI character images based on chimeras. This morning on the way to school we dreamt up a knight+scorpion with tons of armor. Basic: knightstrike, stage 1: knightbite, stage 2: knightflight. Totally installing this font on the kid’s rasp pi. This will be a fun way to explore the keyboard. Love it.
- febed 2y agoHow do you go about doing this? Would like it to try it out too
- tiptup300 2y agoalso curious
- semireg 2y agoI use ChatGPT mobile app and brainstorm. I only show the child the results. Here’s a prompt: “Grim reaper wolf pet in style of Pokémon character. Make the body just out of skull and bones.” Then I take this image to any of the number of online card creators. None are perfect. Most are half broken. You can use ChatGPT to make names. For example, we made a card for my wife who’s an attorney. We asked for character names based on her profession (law) unique last name with a fire theme. Then we asked for attack descriptions. I used these, heavily edited, to create a full card with her “likeness.” Flaming justice hammer, anyone?! For printing I use a laser printer w duplex. I have a trial/error workflow for lining up 4-up cards. I use a heavy poly cardstock from Terraslate. I think the 10 mil. It’s pretty close look/feel and they will last a long time. These are purely for our own enjoyment, but we have also done play dates where we make custom cards for friends that visit. The only downside is every kid wants their character to have 300+ HP. Ha!
- Biganon 2y agoThank you for doing that with you kid
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- BeFlatXIII 2y agoThe characters for the demonstration at the bottom of the page: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.:;, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 1234567890 @ &!?#%
- GauntletWizard 2y agoAnd to maybe save you some playing around to figure out which segments are which: Middles: qwtfgjkcbn Heads: eyip[asvm, Tails: ruo]dhlzx
- BeFlatXIII 2y agoFacing right Middles: QMPGXJUDYT Heads: RHNEZVBK Tails: WFLASCIO special: []-{}\*()
- stevage 2y agoThis is really fun. Surprised it doesn't come with instructions about which letters map onto left/right start/middle/end. Also, the choice of those mappings is not very intuitive. A simple idea might have been a-g starts, h-t middles, u-z ends, for instance.
- dchest 2y agoI mapped A-Z, a-z in a spreadsheet: https://imgur.com/a/pMKdX3i https://imgur.com/a/pMKdX3i for the purpose of generating random chimeras :) https://twitter.com/dchest/status/1786033028034125984 https://twitter.com/dchest/status/1786033028034125984 Here's a list for the left-to-right ones: const tails = "dhloruxzER" const bodies = "bcfgjknqtw" const heads = "aempsy"
- eb0la 2y agoMy kids will love it. I am supporting the author right now :-)
- birracerveza 2y agoThis is great!
- bluelightning2k 2y agoFinally, a typeface that allows me to imagine chimeric creatures.
- owenpalmer 2y agoThe art style reminds me of Ben Awad's Neopet project
- nuancebydefault 2y agoOn a little side track -- why is the word typeface (often and here as well) used when there is a shorter, more known word available? PS I really like this very creative font!
- wayvey 2y agoDoes this use ligatures to join up parts of these creatures together?
- happytoexplain 2y agoIt appears to use the good old-fashioned technique of making the edges of each character have the same profile, so any two characters abut seamlessly. You can put your cursor on them to see this. Also, when I want to know what some string is actually composed of, I like to copy-paste it into https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html Edit: Sorry, I answered your question as though you had asked about joiner characters. Still, it appears not to use ligatures, as the characters appear not to change at all if you separate them.
- Zeratoss 2y agoWow this looks amazing. I have never seen fonts used like this. Any other examples?
- jiveturkey 2y agohttps://www.vectrotype.com/chartwell https://www.vectrotype.com/chartwell
- enasterosophes 2y agohttps://www.sansbullshitsans.com/ https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/ > The font that replaces every buzzword by a Comic Sans-styled censorship bar
- marban 2y agoZapf dingbats :)
- happytoexplain 2y agoI think the parent means using a font to create the illusion of a continuous image, not just the concept of a pictographic font.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jprete 2y ago8-bit-era computers like the C64 (which were all monospace) had glyphs in the font for making borders and lines and the like.
- fallingsquirrel 2y agoFontemon - a playable Pokemon-style game in a font file https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html
- 2y ago
- blikstiender 2y agoThis is really fun! What would be really satisfying would be to be able to make “creatures” out of real words. Currently a lot of the common vowels represent “end” segments (either heads or tails).
- pimlottc 2y agoThe regex for this (for left-facing creatures) is ^[aeimpvy][bcfgjknqtw]*[dhloruxz]$ Unfortunately, as you point out, all the vowels are in the end segments, so there's no creatures with a midbody longer than 2 letters. Here's what you get [0]: ad ago ah and ankh awl ax ego eh end er etch ex id inch into itch However, you can also include words that form multiple creatures [1]. Some favorites: aggrandizer alexander equalizer inlander mumbler phalanx poacher prelingual voided 0: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfgjknqtw%5D*%5Bdhloruxz%5D%24 https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfgj... 1: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E(%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfgjknqtw%5D*%5Bdhloruxz%5D)*%24\ https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E(%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfg...*
- pimlottc 2y agoIt actually gets a tiny bit better for upper case letters, as the midbody character set includes both U and Y. So the winner for longest single-creature word is: ADJUDGE Other good ones [0]: AUTUMN IMPUGN OUTGUN SMUDGE AUGUR FUDGE FUGUE LYMPH 0: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E%5Bacfilosw%5D%5Bdgjmpqtuxy%5D*%5Bbehknrvz%5D%24 https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E%5Bacfilosw%5D%5Bdgjm...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jprete 2y agoI like that idea! Probably needs ligatures or some way to get glyphs to overlap or reverse direction.
- feoren 2y agoI love some of the interpretation of symbol characters. Check these out: - * ($) [$$] {$$$} , I particularly like the asterisk being a starfish -- quite in character for the font. I found myself wishing that the capital letters went in the same order as the lowercase. To reverse 'a' you have to type 'Z', and to reverse 'b' you have to type 'Y', which gets confusing toward the middle of the alphabet.
- tetris11 2y agotry also (German Keyboard): * AltGr-X or Y (two way pipe) * AltGr-E (vertical bar) * AltGr-J (adds dots vertically below last character) Their `Shift' variants also invert the placement Edit: Oh I just realised the "J" one is a German Keyboard symbol stacker and nothing to do with the font.˙
- nevir 2y agoCould ligatures be used to make the heads/tails automatic? (e.g. first letter of any word is rendered as a head, last letter always a tail)
- pimlottc 2y agoAh, I didn’t realize there was a preview text field at the bottom of the page! Looked like another page decoration
- TeeMassive 2y agoGreat for tabletop RPGs!
- wizardwes 2y agoAgreed, and then I thought about using it with OpenSCAD to do insets on some dice boxes as well
- turtleyacht 2y agoInteresting. For directions and mapping, a font that showed turns, highway markers, and road signs could help a person "think" in terms of direction or orientation. Since they are recognizable glyphs, we shortcut having to learn grammar and vocabulary; meaning is already "natively encoded" in the existing language.
- metalliqaz 2y ago⬆⬇↗↖↔↩
- turtleyacht 2y agoYes, like those. I guess a whole LSP that revolves around destinations and memory. To compile it is to reach some satisfactory state where the model--and this differs from person to person--reflects reality: total minutes spent or miles travelled. I guess games already enable the forward, forward, turning, and such. But wayfinding is tacit: one person gets lost; another notes the top of the tower, descends into a dark thicket, flanks a camp of orcs, and somehow heads in more or less the way. Of course, some of that is just going with the flow. Not so in traffic, in an unknown place, jostled by rail tracks and wondering whether to U-turn or not. (Unfamiliar roads, and was it east or west?) A friend said they note landmarks. Or maybe one should have heuristics, like three lefts is parallel to one right. One thing for certain: without GPS, it is hopeless.
- bschwindHN 2y agoHang on, since when did HN allow emoji?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dang 2y agoWe filter out ranges of Unicode characters that have been used for junk posts in the past, but there are many other ranges that have occasional legit use and are allowed.
- janetmissed 2y agoThis is adorable, I had so much fun seeing what creatures I could make.
- syngrog66 2y ago[flagged]
- epiccoleman 2y agoThis is really cool, I've had so much fun putting together critters this morning! I threw together a little page on my site that has a textarea where you can try out the font, if you want to experiment without having to download it yourself. https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2024-05-02-teranoptia-playground https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2024-05-02-teranoptia-playgrou... I'd like to toss together a little table of the symbols too, and I also thought it would be cool to use html2canvas to let people download a picture of their creation. Maybe I'll get around to that after work tonight.
- BugsJustFindMe 2y agoYour /assets/me.jpg is a 1.3MB image, but is only displayed at very small thumbnail size on your page.
- epiccoleman 2y agoGreat feedback, I'll look into reducing the size of that image, especially for the post headers. Thanks for checking out the site!
- epiccoleman 2y agoQuick imagemagick command got it down to 22kb, and a slightly larger one for the frontpage is now only 80kb. The frontpage load feels a lot snappier now, thanks again for the tip!
- epiccoleman 2y agoFew days later, but it seemed most natural to post this here - I created a little cheat sheet of all the available options. It lets you copy the relevant character to your clipboard upon clicking it, which is helpful for some of the oddball characters you might not have on your keyboard. https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2024-05-05-teranoptia-cheatsheet https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2024-05-05-teranoptia-cheatshe...
- california-og 2y agoThe author of the font made it also Glyph Drawing Club "compatible", which is a modular shape builder I've built that works with font files. You can just drag and drop an otf or ttf file on the app window and it'll load the glyphs as svg shapes to draw with. The neat thing is that it works in two dimensions, and you can also rotate (with r hotkey) or invert (with i hotkey) the glyphs, and output the drawing as SVG or PNG. https://glyphdrawing.club https://glyphdrawing.club
- noman-land 2y agoWow, this is so incredibly cool.
- incidentist 2y agoWell this is utterly wonderful.