What a wonderful adventure! My favorite of all the recent HN posts.
This is the true spirit of hacking:
> So, this stumped me for a while. I decided I needed to get to know fonts better, so I built a simple web app to view the lines, curves and control points present in the fonts I had. On this basis, I started to consider the ways the features (vertices, curves, stems, serifs etc) might be matched up between fonts. However, this was a rabbit hole I might never get to the bottom of - particularly when considering some of the more unusual varieties of font. Perhaps there was a simpler idea that was evading me.
Of course, now what I'd like to see is the source code to generate the "average" font on a different machine. It would be interesting (for me at least!) to see the average font from a font designer's machine - or someone who collects different monospaced fonts - or my own machine.
I suppose it's not so much "source code" as it is a bunch of manual steps - but would be interesting to know more about those steps, maybe even enough to repeat them.
This is the true spirit of hacking:
> So, this stumped me for a while. I decided I needed to get to know fonts better, so I built a simple web app to view the lines, curves and control points present in the fonts I had. On this basis, I started to consider the ways the features (vertices, curves, stems, serifs etc) might be matched up between fonts. However, this was a rabbit hole I might never get to the bottom of - particularly when considering some of the more unusual varieties of font. Perhaps there was a simpler idea that was evading me.
Of course, now what I'd like to see is the source code to generate the "average" font on a different machine. It would be interesting (for me at least!) to see the average font from a font designer's machine - or someone who collects different monospaced fonts - or my own machine.
I suppose it's not so much "source code" as it is a bunch of manual steps - but would be interesting to know more about those steps, maybe even enough to repeat them.