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Comment by manv1 | Hacker News Reader

Some of the fonts (Beowolf) will never be duplicated because the font re-renders itself every time, which lead to some neat effects when ripped for print

There's an OpenType version, but since TT fonts aren't programs the way Postscript fonts are it's not really the same.

https://www.fontshop.com/families/ff-beowolf

I believe it's still the only RandomFont ever made.

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For other examples, see http://luc.devroye.org/randomizedfonts.html.

Amongst other things, assuming what that page says is true, only Type 3 fonts support that (randomizing glyphs at render time), not Type 1.

Beowulf was a Type 3 PostScript font, not Type 1, so that it could bypass the font cache and could access random numbers on the LaserWriter PostScript interpreter.

Type 3 fonts don't have hinting in the renderer, and require a full PostScript interpreter, so they have never been widely supported.

I saw this and went back to the black book to read up, and yeah, type 1s are limited to a certain subset of PS because the font is pre-tokenized.

Interesting I never noticed that before now.

FYI Type 3s were totally widely supported, and supported by everything that supported Type 1s. Type 3s may not have worked with ATM, but I had a huge collection of fonts and never remember seeing a Type 3 font that didn't render correctly. I did have commercial fonts from real foundries, so maybe the ones made by people didn't render.

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