Teranoptia – a typeface that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures | Hacker News Reader

Teranoptia – a typeface that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures

tunera.xyz

531 pointsdchest57 comments

This 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-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.

The 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

Wow, that is really cool. I'll definitely be playing with this later, thanks for the tip!

This is pretty neat, and cool as a design style for doing "tilesque" types of drawing. Would there happen to be a way to add your own tileset, font, or tile atlas? Would then allow for rather quick tilemap creation (GB, NES, SNES style; a lot of cell phone games, many Steam releases, ect...). Lots of market. 500 games released last week on Steam. https://steamdb.info/upcoming/?lastweek Out of the 28 so far today, 6 appear to be tile based.

If not, may borrow at least some of the design features for a project, as with a bit of simplification in a few areas, and changes for cell phones, it would actually make a nice way for users to interact with tile based games. Place an object, move an object, flip an object.

The tab based design and layout also works nicely desktop to phone for the most part, which is a nice plus for adaptation.

Anyways, neat tool, and especially design flow and layout. Also, the 15 pages of font use on https://velvetyne.fr/in-use/ is pretty crazy to look at.

EDIT: Also, to the author of Teranoptia, the licensing layout is actually rather nice and really clear about uses immediately. Lot of the web has vague license names, yet the direct use listing is beneficial.

Thanks. Kinda expected (or at least I do, being accustomed to Google Fonts) nowadays a font-hosting site to have something like that.

edit: Just saw sibling comment that placeholder text is editable. Hadn't noticed it.

The creatures at the bottom of the page are editable already.

Thanks, I didn't realize this.

D'oh! Of course they are haha. It didn't even occur to me to try.

Edit: I guess one neat thing about my page is that you get a readout of the characters in your critter. Obviously you could just copy-paste from that field at the bottom of the Tunera page into any other text field and find out that way, but I did find it helpful when I was trying to experiment.

Your /assets/me.jpg is a 1.3MB image, but is only displayed at very small thumbnail size on your page.

Great feedback, I'll look into reducing the size of that image, especially for the post headers. Thanks for checking out the site!

Quick 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!

Few 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-cheatshe...

I 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.

Could 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)

Ah, I didn’t realize there was a preview text field at the bottom of the page! Looked like another page decoration

try 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.˙

Me 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.

How do you go about doing this? Would like it to try it out too

also curious

I 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!

Thank you for doing that with you kid

Interesting. 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.

⬆⬇↗↖↔↩

Hang on, since when did HN allow emoji?

We 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.

Stratagem too complex, controller is broken.

Yes, 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.

This 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).

I like that idea! Probably needs ligatures or some way to get glyphs to overlap or reverse direction.

The 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%5Bbcfgj...

1: https://regexdictionary.com/regex?r=%5E(%5Baeimpvy%5D%5Bbcfg...*

It 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%5Bdgjm...

Wow this looks amazing.

I have never seen fonts used like this.

Any other examples?

Zapf dingbats :)

I think the parent means using a font to create the illusion of a continuous image, not just the concept of a pictographic font.

8-bit-era computers like the C64 (which were all monospace) had glyphs in the font for making borders and lines and the like.

Fontemon - a playable Pokemon-style game in a font file

https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html

That game data is text, and that you reverse the game by hitting backspace are interesting ideas. I'm curious if there is any utility beyond novelty though. It's certainly very creative, I'll be thinking about it.

https://www.vectrotype.com/chartwell

https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/

> The font that replaces every buzzword by a Comic Sans-styled censorship bar

This 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.

I mapped A-Z, a-z in a spreadsheet:

https://imgur.com/a/pMKdX3i

for the purpose of generating random chimeras :)

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"

On 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!

Finally, a typeface that allows me to imagine chimeric creatures.

Great for tabletop RPGs!

Agreed, and then I thought about using it with OpenSCAD to do insets on some dice boxes as well

The characters for the demonstration at the bottom of the page:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.:;, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 1234567890 @ &!?#%

And to maybe save you some playing around to figure out which segments are which:

    Middles: qwtfgjkcbn
    Heads: eyip[asvm,
    Tails: ruo]dhlzx

Facing right

    Middles: QMPGXJUDYT
    Heads: RHNEZVBK
    Tails: WFLASCIO
    special: []-{}\*()

Well this is utterly wonderful.

The art style reminds me of Ben Awad's Neopet project

This is adorable, I had so much fun seeing what creatures I could make.

Does this use ligatures to join up parts of these creatures together?

It 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

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.

My kids will love it. I am supporting the author right now :-)

Wow, this is so incredibly cool.

This is great!

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