Random Font – a typographic experiment exploring randomness [pdf]
45 points
9 days ago
| 5 comments
| ilcovile.it
| HN
misone
9 days ago
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A printed essay where each paragraph is rendered in a different, randomly selected typeface. Found on Il Covile, an Italian publication exploring typography, philosophy, and design. The text is presented in both Italian and English.

The text is presented in both Italian and English.

The authors also created a LibreOffice extension that applies random fonts to any document, allowing users to experiment with the same generative approach directly. It's called "Patina": https://www.ilcovile.it/V3_p_patina.html

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rgovostes
14 hours ago
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The technique applied is not randomly selecting a different typeface per paragraph, but tweaking the glyph shapes when a character is repeated. Glancing at the LibreOffice extension, it seems to slightly vary CharScaleWidth by 90–110% and CharEscapementHeight by 97–100% of the base height.
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MultifokalHirn
9 days ago
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cool, thank you!
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pgtan
13 hours ago
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kragen
6 hours ago
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METAFONT in particular does not have a way to write code to produce different random variations for the same glyph, nor does its output format have a way to encode those multiple alternatives in its output. I'm not sure if PostScript Type 1 fonts do either, but I'm less familiar with them.
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wkoszek
7 hours ago
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The effect is beautiful. Is there a way to easily get the very same effect in TeX or some other text -> PDF format?
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gus_massa
12 hours ago
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English version in page 7.
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Fnoord
10 hours ago
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Clever to apply on a restaurant menu (like in example on page 7). It makes the dishes feel more outstanding, special therefore justifying the price. Which other examples could make sense?
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mock-possum
14 hours ago
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Delightful! I wonder whether I could achieve this effect in pure css…
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rgovostes
13 hours ago
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I made a brief attempt of splitting each character into a separate <span style="transform: scale(<random>, <random>)">c</span>, but it doesn't look good because the transform is applied after the glyph is rasterized. I didn't see a way to scale the font size itself in two different axes, and applying a single scaling factor of 97-100% does not perfectly recreate the effect. text-rendering: geometricPrecision probably helps.
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