california-og

Some of these effects are actually really easy to do with CSS @font-face & unicode-range. See: view-source:https://hlnet.neocities.org/font-face-tricks

Author here, thanks for sharing the essay & archive!

Tell me about it... I have plans to migrate this to a static HTML at some point.

Slanted magazine did an issue recently on digital tools and compiled their own list:

https://www.slanted.de/news/digital-tools/

The issue has screenshots of many of them: https://www.slanted.de/product/slanted-magazine-47-digital-t...

This is my list, thanks for sharing!

It started out as a list for ASCII and textmode art editors but grew to include all kinds of alternative design tools. I've hosted two workshops where the assigment is to create a printed zine without the use of any Adobe software. I give this list to the participants to explore. The scans of these zines and more info can be found here:

https://tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi/residenssi/hei...

https://tekstien-marginaalien-keskus.aalto.fi/residenssi/hei...

I think its crazy that my University (Aalto) pays over a million euros in licencing fees to Adobe every year while the design teachers are chronically overworked and understaffed. My ultimate goal is to persuade the institution to ditch Adobe and switch to FOSS tools, and hire more staff & teachers.

I made this, thank you so much for your kind words!

The show source toggle is shamelessly stolen from another awesome blog, https://garten.salat.dev/

Maker here. Just found this thread... Thank you so much for your nice words! :)

Thank you for this! I had come across it by name before but totally forgot about it until you mentioned it again. I'll have to hunt it down, seems like some antique bookshops have it for a reasonable price.

Yes, I agree. Thank you for the advice and leads, much appreciated! I will dig into these. The archive is scoped to letterpress only, so that will automatically skew it more towards latin based typographic cultures, but I would like to find more non Latin stuff, especially Arabic. Haven't yet found very good archives for that though.

Some Japanese letterpress works I already have catalogued, and they're amazing:

https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?filters=japan

A recent blogpost by Jacob Filipp has good info on it:

https://jacobfilipp.com/hana-no-shiori/

Unfortunately the Japanese archives that I've found have mostly poor quality microfilms though, which makes further search a bit unmotivating.

Thank you! It has taken me a long time. The two main methods:

1. Text content search with keywords/sentences or people's names. This is the best way, but finding good keywords is hard. 2. Randomly browsing, especially typography trade journals. Internet Archive has all issues of Inland Printer for example. Reading through them I've found many new pictures and keywords to do further searches on.

Thank you! If you click on the images, you get a zoomable, full resolution view.

Definitely! Take a look at these books:

—Fun with your typewriter by Madge Roemer https://archive.org/details/FunWithTypewriter/mode/thumb

—Artyping by Julius Nelson https://archive.org/details/Artyping-HQ/mode/thumb

—Typewriter Art by Alan Riddell https://archive.org/details/TypewriterArt-AlanRiddell/mode/t...

Heh no worries and thanks! I love Arabic/Islamic calligraphy too, but I've had to leave out all calligraphic forms of text art (calligrammes, micrography, carmina figurata, 17th century european calligraphic art, etc..) out of the archive to keep the scope of the project focused and clear. Otherwise it would take me another 8 years :)

However, there's some arabic letterpress stuff in the archive! https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?filters=arabic I hope to find more, especially the kufic style, but I haven't found many good sources for that kind of stuff yet.

I keep a list of all current ASCII art (and related + other creative tools) editors out there, if you're interested:

https://hlnet.notion.site/text-art-tools

I recommend Moebius for traditional ASCII and ANSI art.

I made a syntax highlighting font (also mentioned as an inspiration to Z80 sans):

https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/font-with-built-in-syntax-hig...

I made a paint app for toddlers recently, exactly because I couldn't find anything fun & useable & educational:

https://glyphdrawingclub.itch.io/mr-baby-paint

Thank you! :)

I made an interactive viewer some time ago (scroll down a bit):

https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/the-origins-of-del-0x7f-and-i...

It really helps understand the logic of ASCII.

I didn't mean to imply that I find all positive content boring — just the kind of positive content that would rise to /r/all in reddit at that time, which was mostly quickly digestable content (like animal pictures). And it was also boring in the sense that it was much "slower" to change within a day than the unfiltered /r/all, so I would largely see the same content for a lot longer.

YouTube is also similiar. I need to be quite careful what to click so "my algorithm" stays interesting and wholesome. If I click on any remotely baity and negative video, the recommendations algo picks it up almost immediately and devolves into garbage.

I also found it a very good thing. After the API use ban, and losing my blocklist, I couldn't go back to browsing normal reddit anymore and was finally able to quit after 10+ years. And, it has made me very resistant to joining or doomscrolling any other social media too. I think the hn model is decent because it doesn't optimize for engagement but for intellectual curiosity, whether it's positive or negative, which leads to mostly earnest and interesting discussion.

Back when Reddit allowed API access, I used a reader (rif) which allowed blocking subreddits. I did an experiment where I would browse /r/all and block any subreddit that had a toxic, gruesome, nsfw, or other content playing on negative emotions (like a pseudo feel-good post based on an otherwise negative phenomena). After a few years, and hundreds of banned subreddits, my /r/all was very wholesome, but contained only animal or niche hobby related subreddits. It was quite eye-opening on how negative reddit is, and also revealed how boring it is without the kind of algorithmic reaction seeking content.

In other words, if 35% of hn content is positive (or neutral?), compared to reddit and most mainstream social media, it's actually very positive!

Edit: I found the list of blocked subreddits if anyone is curious to see:

https://hlnet.neocities.org/RIF_filters_categorized.txt

Note that it also includes stuff I wasn't interested in at the time, like anime, and only has subreddits up until I quit, around the API ban.

My go-to site for Unicode symbols is graphemica.com. I like that you show very directly the different use cases, but miss different encodings and the ability to browse unicode sequentially.

I think you're seriously confused or purposefully trolling. That's not the web component I'm talking about, that's just plain html.

That's for the code-editor webcomponent, the rest of the site doesn't use JS.

I'm 100% sure it does. Check again.

Most likely because your JS blocker also blocks custom fonts. It works fine without JS.

Unscii is great! A few years ago I made a simple mobile-friendly Unscii art editor: http://unicode-drawing-club.netlify.app/

check out https://fontstruct.com/ and https://glyphdrawing.club/ for a few editors that work this way (i made glyphdrawing.club). but please make one for this!

It does mention it pretty clearly in the "what is stone paper" page: https://stone-paper.nl/en/wat-is-stone-paper/