Teranoptia – a typeface that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures

[epiccoleman]

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.

[california-og]

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

[breadwinner]

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

[BugsJustFindMe]

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

[epiccoleman]

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...

[forgotpwd16]

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.

[feoren]

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.

[pimlottc]

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

[tetris11]

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.˙

[nevir]

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)

[semireg]

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.

[febed]

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

[Biganon]

Thank you for doing that with you kid

[turtleyacht]

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.

[metalliqaz]

⬆⬇↗↖↔↩

[blikstiender]

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).

[pimlottc]

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...*

[jprete]

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

[Zeratoss]

Wow this looks amazing.

I have never seen fonts used like this.

Any other examples?

[fallingsquirrel]

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

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

[enasterosophes]

https://www.sansbullshitsans.com/

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

[jprete]

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

[jiveturkey]

https://www.vectrotype.com/chartwell

[marban]

Zapf dingbats :)

[stevage]

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.

[dchest]

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"

[nuancebydefault]

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!

[bluelightning2k]

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

[TeeMassive]

Great for tabletop RPGs!

[wizardwes]

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

[BeFlatXIII]

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

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

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

[GauntletWizard]

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

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

[incidentist]

Well this is utterly wonderful.

[owenpalmer]

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

[janetmissed]

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

[wayvey]

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

[happytoexplain]

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.

[eb0la]

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

[noman-land]

Wow, this is so incredibly cool.

[birracerveza]

This is great!

[widowlark]

What is worthy of HN is determined by user interest. You are not the gatekeeper of HN.

I for one love this project. Amazing work, Ariel!