Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor | Hacker News Reader

Brutalita Sans: An Experimental Font and Font Editor

brutalita.com

601 pointsfibo80 comments

Author here! I'm so happy to see Brutalita randomly popping up on Hacker News!

I had fun building this small project, there are a few fun things I did to make this work:

- The editor is a textarea with a monospace font, but the text is transparent, the font is rendered on top of it using SVG of the same size and line height as the monospace font behind it. This way I didn't have to recreate a whole editor and got the real-time preview I wanted.

- The way the SVG preview and the 'real font' are constructed is different. I talk about this a bit more on my blog [1] but in short in SVG I can use "thick lines" with rounded corners, and for the font I have to render polygons and I found a great library "mfogel/polygon-clipping" that makes the process of combining them a breeze.

Thank you all for the interest! I might work on an update or two ;)

[1] https://javier.xyz/blog/brutalita-learning-opentypejs

The editor does not seem to allow to move nodes, nor does it allow to delete a node, or at least to delete the last node of a chain. This makes the editing process more like a puzzle + skill game. One wrong click, and you have to redo from start. Or put every segment on a separate map, and be good at mentally combining them.

But well, it is an addictive game! :)

If you click on the last node again, it deletes it

Do you accept PR to include some accented characters, or do you prefer keeping a limited set or characters?

Hate the font, love the editor.

edit: tried to type "à", and the letter is not recognized in the font (appears in red in the editor).

Would there be a way to tell the editor that "à" = "a" + "`", rather than retyping the symbol from scratch?

edit2 : Having to remove all the [2..n] points if you want to change the second point you made is also a bit of a pain, especially for people like me with little experience of where the points end up being on the line vertically.

I want to create a GenAI fork of this where you do one character and it tries to mimic the style for all of the others.

I think that would be really difficult to pull off in a way that generates usable fonts. A huge part of fonts is subjective human perception of them.

It would be cool for marketing style fonts though.

Looking at the link and the editor, it seems like a feasible fork.

Relevant tom7 project:

http://tom7.org/lowercase/

Douglas Hofstadter went there with his Letter Spirit project/concept/something. I can't find a decent single link about it, but there seems to have been an HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37754559

Gary McGraw was the first doctoral candidate to work on the Letter Spirit project:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220331021500/http://goosie.cog...

And John Rehling did a second portion in his doctoral work:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150320160815/https://www.cogsc...

(Thanks for this complaint - I hadn't realized that Rehling's thesis was linked from the Waybacked version of his personal page, and that finally completes my collection!)

You can also read Chapter 10 in Hofstadter's 1995 book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" for a pretty solid overview.

But yeah, seeing this project immediately reminded me of Letter Spirit, since it's basically a web editor for gridfonts.

Reminded me a teenie tiny bit of the original font used by Habbo Hotel Volter (Goldfish) which has a rough pixel look to it (at least that's how my nostalgia makes me see it) they got rid of the Volter font when Habbo upgraded from Adobe Shockwave to Adobe Flash, they went to Ubuntu font if I remember correctly. I still miss the old font.

My favorite thing about Habbo's font from back in 2001 is the "emojis" that it had. If you played Habbo back then, you were likely using emojis before they were cool. ;)

That editor is really cool; you can even see the font change live on the left!

https://www.dafont.com/volter-goldfish.font

Also reminiscent of CNC router fonts.

https://webonastick.com/fonts/routed-gothic/

Discussed here a few times. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30190397

I had hopes I could find an answer to https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41048/are-there-an... in this rabbit hole.

Not yet.

Thank you for sending me into a Habbo Hotel rabbit hole of nostalgia! They have a classic mode apparently, which is even on Steam now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3809900/Habbo_Hotel_Origi...

Yeah, that is recent, they have had Origins out for over a year. Friends of mine were indirectly involved in what lead to Origins being a thing. Someone discovered you can just run Shockwave as a standalone executable. The developer leading the efforts for Origins was also iconic in the Habbo reverse engineering scene, where players would recreate the back-end server. He was known as Myrax back then. ;)

I was one of those scene-kids. Some Java guy joined the IRC channel saw what we had coded, swore bloody mercy and then rewrote it as a lesson to us.

I lost the archive on an old hard-drive however the scene still limps along. C# and Java were the main languages used.

https://forum.ragezone.com/community/habbo-hotel.282/

As for that IRC... was it Totov? or... and I don't recall if Jordan had one with Habbo stuff or not...

Java makes it sound like you're talking about Totov where Blunk was born by Nillus and Office.Boy after Nillus coding up two or three C# based emulators.

;) you are forgetting VB6

Reminds me of Teletext, the BBC Micro’s mode 7, and Bedstead https://bjh21.me.uk/bedstead/

The editor and generation scheme is really cool.

I'd like more info on the possible "operations" that form the font glyph though. First I thought it was all just choosing dots on the 3x5 grid and connecting them with lines, but there also seem to be "half-strokes" (lowercase i) and "rounded corners" that don't align with the dots (used for almost all "round" letters like O, C etc). Especially the latter seem to be crucial if you don't want all the round segment to look like diamonds.

So how do I do those things in the editor and are there even more of them?

Edit: Or is it really just 5x9 instead of 3x5 with only every second grid point visible? Lowercase "f" looks like that.

Also, it's kind of obvious you can't draw a "#" sign on a 3x5 grid...

I would suggest drag to move dots

Same, I love the idea but the editor needs a bit of work. Moving dots, deleting dots and dragging to create new lines would be nice.

On the other hand I do like that it is low resolution so one is limited from trying to add lots of details.

It's very nice and interesting, but the font editor is... brutal.

There is no way to undo, redo, or move the anchor points. At least you can delete the last line segment by clicking on the last point.

It would also help to indicate which dot is starting point and which is the ending point.

To me the magic here is that the font used on the website text updates in realtime when you make changes to any glyph. Anyone know how that's happening, exactly?

Hey! For the real-time editor I have an invisible textarea in the background with a monospace font and I'm rendering SVGs on top of it, each character is a React component.

Sorry, I have only browsed this on my phone and haven't looked at the structure at all..I mean the whole text of the page that says "Brutalita is an experimental font..."

I can select the text from this and copy it. When you say that the text area is invisible... you mean it's not display:none or hidden... it's the color of the background and still selectable but it's covered with white SVG glyphs? Hah... if that's what I'm understanding it's a very funny trick!

With heavy use of SVG <symbol>, one would hope!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

Very nice font.

In italian "Brutalita" (but with an accent on the last a: "Brutalità") it means brutality.

An amazing thing, given the author is Spanish speaker I really miss the ñ Ñ. But I guess his answer is going to be, you can make those yourself!

I tried to do that, and now I’m just confused. The included glyph for the lower case n doesn’t actually fit the grid, so you can’t seem to replicate it. But also that grid doesn’t have enough resolution to do the tilde. Maybe I’m missing something?

Yeah, there are some sort of shenanigans going on in the editor. The premade letters use a finer grid than what the editor lets you work with.

It's most obvious with O, {, & and # which are impossible to draw with the grid that's presented to you.

Noticed that on desktop, the real grid, including the "half points" is shown and you can actually work with it. So it might just be a problem with the mobile version.

Enter a N or n into the Editing box, you'll see the two grids that make the glyph up along with a blank third grid on the bottom, add a small tilde in the top two rows. Or copy and paste the actual Ñ or ñ characters into the Editing box to create it new, and you can use it immediately with the alphabet textbox on the left.

The editor doesn’t understand ñ and you can’t make a tilde because it requires a minimum of four points of width.

Yes, and those glyphs don’t fit the grid. Try to redraw the n from the original font yourself. You can’t, because you can’t add points between the grid dots.

Wow, this is both really fun and very technically impressive!

I appreciate how lower-case ‘L’, digit ‘1’ and upper-case ‘I’ are differentiated. Also alpha ‘O’ and zero.

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921137

The grid is too narrow. :( With just five pixels, I can't make a decent looking ß and ẞ that are sufficiently distinct from each other.

How do you edit different letters? When I opened it, 'Q' is selected but I don't see buttons to change letter?

Yes this threw me off when I first opened it. When you select the letter field you see a flashing cursor but you can't erase the character and type a new one. Instead you have to type a new character which overwrites the old "editing" character. This is confusing because it's not the behavior that the user expects when they see a flashing cursor in a text input.

I would suggest allowing people to erase the letter and type a new one in the editing field.

Once I figured out this little UI hiccup I found it absolutely delightful to play with this. What a fascinating experiment in making a font immediately editable, like a mini font-REPL. I've often been interested in (but never dabbled in) creating or editing fonts. This made that itch immediately scratchable in a raw, primitive way that unlocked something interesting in my brain.

This is a great example of what art can do.

Where you see the 'Q', it's a text-field, you can just enter a different letter and it'll switch.

The letter below the "Editing" label is an input field. You can change the current letter there.

Thanks, got it! There's no clue that it's editable.

Type the letter you want in the left box.

This is amazing!

Reminds when I was doing my own bitmap fonts on ZX Spectrum and Amiga. They were probably very ugly by today's standards but they were mine :) I guess I'll create one for my terminal, it probably won't be used there for too long but it would remind me of times when I was more in control of my machine.

One does not need a WWW-based editor to make that kind of font, if you're going to give it a go. A text editor and Viznut's perl scripts yields BDF files quite straightforwardly.

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/font-topaz.t...

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/font-spectru...

Hi, Thank you so much for this. Brutalita is PERFECT, I edited the BGRP letters and will be using it for a new game I'm working on. I was just looking for something like this, kinda futuristic but minimal and simple. I love it.

Reminds me of how the fonts are defined in the IBM 2250 and the CDC 6x00 console.

How to split line? Not clear how to draw character with accents, for example

> How to split line?

Each (poly) line has a separate layer. Preview '#' character to get an idea. A new layer is created every time you fill the previous one.

Got it, thanks

Each box is a layer. So you put the accent in the second box.

Cool but pretty bad edit UI. Can't figure out how to edit an existing letter without starting from scratch. One letter at a time. What are even the additional grids below the letter being edited?

I like the UI, as more of a thing-to-play-with than a serious typographic tool. Each grid contains a continuous polyline.

This would have come in handy when I built https://WordGlyph.xyz a word game based on building a letter font

Reminds me of Metafont by Donald Knuth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont

Will need to try this in a terminal but on initial glance it looks similar to terminus (a font I've been trying to find a replacement for for over 20 years....)

Cool idea, it was a bit painful for me though. The UX was frustrating, and I only served to make the font worse lol

Font showcase websites are frequently some of my favorites from a design perspective. This stuff just looks awesome.

The font has bad support for CJK fonts (take Chinese for example).

en: Hello, World! zh: 你好，世界！

You can copy that in their font editor to give it a try.

Wow this is so cool! Love a nifty but well executed little project. Editor especially is wonderful.

little UX issue: that's a little surprising that knots cannot be moved.

A little reminiscent of modernist Italian fonts seen on war memorials.

Glyph editing makes me feel like I’m doing Marching Squares.

very cool idea for the editor. I remember having to add an entire sprite sheet for fonts. I wonder if it can generate a sprite sheet for generated fonts

Very inspiring... Makes me wanna dive into fonts again...

this read to me like brutalità (which would be "brutality" in italian but i don't know if it is actually a word in use) first

close enough, but it's in spanish. Form the website:

"The name means "little brutal" in Spanish."

so the emphasis is on the 'i'

yes, hence the "first" (before i saw the note)

Yes, is a word in use.

Brutalità is brutality in english.

This needs more upvotes. Hopefully the author reads this comment and provides a hint on how to create extra grids (accidentally deleted one, now I only have 2)

So far as I can tell an extra blank grid appears as soon as the previous blank one has content/pre-existing default grid is edited.

Lots of complaining in here about something that's really well made.

Oblig

https://fontstruct.com/

Very cool.

I viscerally despise brutalism in whatever it tries to influence.

from spain?

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