Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard
Bastardica is a browser-based font foundry that uses Pyodide and OpenType ligatures to locally mix, match, and distort multiple fonts into a single custom OTF file.
summary is enough The web app is immediately intuitive and fun to try, but its technical approach using Pyodide and OpenType ligatures is fully explained in a brief read.
summary
Bastardica is a client-side web tool that combines multiple fonts into a single OpenType file using Python running in the browser via Pyodide and fontTools. Users can adjust scales, offsets, and alternating strides to blend glyphs using standard OpenType contextual substitutions. The generated fonts work anywhere text is rendered, though commercial use requires checking original font licenses. Hacker News users heavily praised the tool for its humorous presets and chaotic typography use cases.
key points
- The application runs entirely client-side using Pyodide and fontTools, generating valid OpenType fonts without uploading source files.
- It implements font mixing via OpenType contextual substitutions and ligatures, allowing glyphs to alternate or overlap automatically.
- Combining fonts creates derivative works, meaning users must verify the licensing terms of source fonts for commercial projects.
who should read it
Frontend developers, web designers, and typography enthusiasts looking for creative developer tools.
discussion warm
consensus
Commenters overwhelmingly praised the tool's humor and creative potential, sharing absurd font combinations like Papyrus mixed with Comic Sans and custom Temu Sans variants.
pushback
A few users cautioned about potential accessibility problems with screen readers and legal complications regarding font licensing.
This is interesting -- not from the perspective of different fonts (although that's interesting too!), but from the perspective of it's a web page that can apparently render fonts on the fly...
That means that it's probably using some library in JavaScript or WASM to implement that.
If that's the case, then I'm thinking, you know, that functionality, that is, font rendering on demand could, in theory, be placed into a CloudFlare Worker (or other Serverless service, i.e. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, OCI Funcions, IBM Cloud Code Engine, Alibaba Function Compute, etc., …
It expands on the technical architecture by examining the broader implications of running a font rendering and modification engine inside the browser via WebAssembly.
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