Times New Bastard

[ybc37]

Reminds me of Hellvetica. Unfortunately, the website is gone, but the Internet Archive has saved us this gem:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201229053709/https://hellvetic...

[jredwards]

This is beautiful for grating discomfort. And for over the top insanity, there's always Z̴͔̊ͤͨ̀ͅä͚̦̯̤͟l̸̤̙̰̥̝ͭ͛ģ͍̫̙̬̪̺ͯo̧̞̖ͤͪͦ͒ ̵̗͍̩͔̀ͭͪţ̪̯̘̭̤̲̰͗͒ͩͬe̢̤̙͇̘ͩ̓ͤx̷̩̤͕̺̍ͅt̩͔̪̠̞̳̟̱͂ͦ͜

[jkingsman]

If you're looking for a download link, this appears to be the least sketchy: https://img1.allbestfonts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Hel...

[yafbum]

Keming matters!

[lambdasquirrel]

Wow… this is actually impressive. It takes work to make something that’s tastefully jarring and awful.

[contravariant]

Hmm, that seems slightly overdone, this just looks like noise to me.

Would be much more annoying if every so often a letter was eve r so s|ightly wrong.

[forgotusername6]

If you want to know the science behind this then here is a good video describing the process https://youtu.be/-Y-yKmzP-4U

[userbinator]

I was expecting the opposite, mostly sans-serif with the occasional serif, but the keming didn't disappoint.

[account-5]

Not dissimilar to my dyslexia.

[Hamuko]

Keming is not important.

[bonyt]

Neat. By a strange coincidence, I made something similar yesterday in a script to make each letter in HTML into a different font. I wanted to see if it would end up as an OCR-proof font:

https://gist.github.com/tonyb486/0e3efc9240953c86a50a019b56c...

An example: https://tmp.tonybox.net/chbgr.htm

Rasterized and OCR'd: https://tmp.tonybox.net/ocr.pdf

[tailspin2019]

Very cool concept

[jredwards]

Seems you were at least partially successful

[yscodes]

Sounds interesting. Mind sharing the gist (hehe) of your results?

Big fan of on-a-whim-experiments.

[einpoklum]

It would be nice if you could make the effective character sizes more uniform.

[toxik]

Man that Fontemon got my phone steaming hot

[fsckboy]

I'm not sure if the serif-icity is the jarring part, I think it's the different point size (or whatever that word is for the horizontal height lines that fonts live within).

I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.

[Blahah]

> I think it's the different point size (or whatever that word is for the horizontal height lines that fonts live within).

Agreed! The x-height [0] (among other things) differs jarringly between the serif and sans fonts used.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-height#:~:text=In%20typogr....

[seba_dos1]

> I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters

Not sure what you're talking about; it did and there are many fonts that use it.

[mywittyname]

People really seem to hate "handwritten" fonts. Comic Sans is the mainstream example, but there are a lot of other ones.

As others said, stylistic alternatives definitely exist in most font packages, especially commercial ones used with Adobe products. So the fact that they are not widely used outside of graphic design probably goes back to people generally hate fonts that look handwritten for anything besides wedding invitations.

[huhtenberg]

It would've been a neater prank if they'd actually chopped off serifs from the original letters and used those for the sans glyphes.

[Jeff_Brown]

Yeah, if they were the same size I'm not sure I would even notice.

[frostburg]

Many of the more complete font families feature stylistic alternatives for certain letters. Usually typesetting software has you manually pick them or select sets, but it could be done as you say.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> I'm curious why type/font technology hasn't developed for variation in letters, where a handwriting or printing typeface (or "Ransom" :) could vary the letter "a" so all the "a"'s don't look alike, the same as happens irl.

Why would you want that? It seems like it would be harder to read for no benefit.

[ryanjshaw]

It gives me flashbacks of bad OCR jobs and trying to copy sensible text out of the resultant messy PDF.

[graypegg]

How does this work? I thought ligatures were just different glyphs stored in the font that would replace some number of other individual characters. Does that mean there’s a ligature glyph for every combination of 7 characters?!

[qwezxcrty]

One can get a similar, extremely ugly effect if one is reading Japanese text rendered on a Chinese language system.

Many kanjis in the Japanese text will default to the glyphs in the system Chinese font. However, the kanas as well as some kanjis are not included in the Chinese font will be rendered with a failback font, frequently in a very different style.

[elboru]

Something similar happens when you use Spanish accent letters (á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ) with fonts that don’t include them.

It’s amazing to me that many people seem to not notice or care that random letters don’t match the font style and they keep using those fonts for Spanish.

[1una]

> Many kanjis in the Japanese text will default to the glyphs in the system Chinese font.

There is a solution if you're using Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration/Examples...

[bobbylarrybobby]

Han unification was such a silly mistake

[zerocrates]

You get this experience the natural way still when fonts don't include a character and the specified stack doesn't have a good fallback.

I still see it on newspapers' websites when they're using a custom font and the headline contains an accented character.

[yarg]

The biggest problem with this is that it's too obvious, if you really want to fuck with people it should require more effort for them to tell what's wrong.

An insidious little niggle that grates upon the mind.

[orhmeh09]

Note that the title of the page is not "Times New Bastard" but "weiweihuanghuang/Times-New-Bastard: It's Times New Roman but every seventh letter is jarringly sans serif", which I had edited down to "Times-New-Bastard: Times New Roman but every 7th letter is jarringly sans serif".

[anonzzzies]

I don’t know if it’s a thing, but I often say I have font blindness; I don’t see the difference in fonts. If I can read it, it is text and I have to really stare for ages to see what’s wrong in this case. I would happily read a book with this font and not notice anything wrong, let alone it being jarring.

Edit; same with the hellvetica example; I have to consciously stare and think to see it’s not normal; I can read it, so my brain doesn’t give two shites about the font, spacing etc.

[birb07]

See https://github.com/Born2Root/Fast-Font for a bionic font using font features as well

[cyanydeez]

A virus whose only payload is to replace times new Roman with this

[m463]

that would ⓝever 𝒲ork.

[globalise83]

Now everyone knows which font to use to write passive-aggressive notices for the unknown flatmate who keeps leaving mouldy food in the fridge.

[fghorow]

Nope. Use it for grant proposals...

[bezier-curve]

We need a font for passive aggressive HN submissions as well.

[tariqrauf]

| Using it on the Web:

| text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;

---

this is poetic, event potentially art

[motohagiography]

It reminds me of lawyergrams, where the language is constructed to antagonize and threaten while still being logically and legally specific and correct - a kind of ransom note with airs. I'd wonder if some white shoe firm has gone to the trouble of commissioning an in-house font based on similar design principles to this Times New Bastard, just for that purpose.

[ForOldHack]

Give me a font name that will offend more than 97% of the population, like !@^$-!@$!@$-!&%^!@-(*&!-BOLD.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> !@^$-!@$!@$-!&%^!@-(*&!-BOLD.

Shit, I need to change my password.

[anthk]

That might be valid Perl code.

[smitty1e]

I had remained staunchly skeptical about the domestic terrorism talk. Until now.

[Pxtl]

Reminds me of how Twitter uses an odd font for @usernames where the I and 1 and l have serifs so you can tell them apart, but is otherwise sans serif. Every time I see a username with an I in it it looks weird.

[lloydatkinson]

I didn’t know fonts would be capable of figuring out how many had been typed in order to swap the 7th regardless of which character it was, even with ligatures. That’s kind of crazy.

[contrarian1234]

The developer has a great personal webpage:

https://weiweihuanghuang.github.io/

great trollin' :))

[DubiousPusher]

I've never built a font. I had no idea you could do something procedural with them like this. I always assumed they were just a bunch of glyphs in a file.