Hacker News Reader

Comment by ofrzeta | Hacker News Reader

It's nice but it's no longer HTML text. So you can't use it as a web font or for any HTML text elements. Also no cut and paste, no accessibility etc.

View on HN

Accessibility was my first thought. For as long as there's been the web there's been an ongoing struggle between visual improvements and accessibility. One thing we've learnt is that many developers don't take accessibility into consideration, so messing around with the simplest concept of HTML, text, seems like a negative in terms of accessibility.

I’m not so sure about that. AFAICT it’s possible to add accessibility to canvas elements. See e.g. http://pauljadam.com/demos/canvas.html

Well, ok, you can provide accessibility alternatives to a Canvas. But does it make much sense to do that for something that would otherwise be text? Ok, granted that Leon Sans will probably be used for nice headers and such it would probably be feasible.

Yeah, in my mind this occupies a very different space that an actual font. It's sizzle & style. Not substance.

There are lots of use cases, consider generating art for example.

Is there really no way to turn this into a WOFF?

It's beautiful!

Can't see a problem. https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/119350/69210

Well, I can. Not sure how your pasting a StackOverflow URL is an easy solution to that problem. I see no mention of SVG on the Leon site. To use the proposed solution you would first need to generate SVG from the Leon Javascript Canvas code. That's probably not impossible but certainly not "easy".

Oh! https://github.com/gliffy/canvas2svg

Just to make a point I cloned that repo and ran "npm test" that failed with

  "/tmp/canvas2svg/node_modules/socket.io/lib/store.js:35
  Store.prototype.__proto__ = EventEmitter.prototype;
                                       
  TypeError: Cannot read property 'prototype' of undefined
  ..."

But otherwise I am sure it will work out of the box. Just keep on Googling!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com