Bastardica

Creative

font generator

SHOW HN2026

862points
126comments
#15of 4,366 in 2026
Top 1%of 2026 by points

How HN took it

LovedMost comments that take a side are positive

46 positive, 40 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 8 critical, out of 96 comments about the project. Thread score +0.45.

Design: 18 for, 3 againstIdea: 10 for, 1 againstExecution: 3 for, 0 againstDocs: 0 for, 2 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Funny and fun; font names like Temu Sans and Royal Ransom get laughs

    From 3 comments
    • Temu Sans is an absolutely beautiful demo choice. I love this. Thank you for making it.
      altairprime on HN
    • That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.
      kstrauser on HN
    • I have been looking for this for a very long time without knowing I have been looking for it. Royal Ransom especially is a masterpiece, I will be writing all of my work emails in…
      hackeryojo on HN
  • Clever and well executed demo site

    From 2 comments
    • temu sans is beautifully on point
      philjohn on HN
    • Nice! It even supports COLR and SVG fonts, both of which I have options for when making a variant of my Keldritch font (https://kellydornhaus.com/keldritch/)
      furyofantares on HN

Objections

  • Readme is wall of text with few examples, so the related tool got less interest

    From 2 comments
    • Your tool looks interesting but the readme file is very "wall of text" heavy and example light. In comparison the site for this tool shows exactly what it does. Perhaps that…
      amoss on HN
    • The difference is that today's tool has a demo website that makes the whole thing self-explanatory. Yours is a repository that speaks "figure it out".
      dostick on HN
  • Some fonts are hard to read or uncomfortable to look at

    From 2 comments
    • I'm just a regular Joe, no font expertise. Sorry for the brutal honesty, just thought it might offer you an explanation of the difference in reaction. OP's fonts look ugly, but…
      aargh_aargh on HN
    • Thanks, I hate it.
      phren0logy on HN
  • Would break screen readers and accessibility

    From 2 comments
    • Fun though the idea is, assistive technologies such as TTS will also have problems with it.
      smeehee on HN
    • I use a screen reader. Please do not do this.
      ctoth on HN

Requests

  • Mix in more fonts such as Google Fonts

    From 1 comment
  • Alternate every nth glyph between two fonts

    From 2 comments
    • If you really wanted to let me be a sneaky bastard, you'd let me mix Helvetica with Arial every nth glyph. (...and yes, I see I'm not the first to suggest this.)
      ayaros on HN
    • created the ultimate monster, papyrus + comic sans every 3 glyph
      Rinkia on HN
  • Fix out-of-bounds memory error on iOS when changing mix-in font

    From 1 comment
    • This is great! FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS): ``` Something went wrong: Out of bounds memory access (evaluating…
      NietzscheanNull on HN

Questions

  • Could the effect be done with pure CSS or JavaScript instead?

    From 1 comment
    • If I'm reading this correctly, this tool generates a new font by mixing fonts and altering proprieties of the fonts. In other words, a new font is produced. Could you produce…
      xrd on HN
  • How large is the footprint compared with combining fonts client-side?

    From 1 comment
    • Such a cool idea, breath in new live to old fonts! I wonder what's the footprint and overall efficiency of making a new font vs. combining old ones on client side (typically JS)?
      flockonus on HN

Alternatives named

  • fambigen, a font glyph-path mixer by scottvr

    From 1 comment
    • So at first I misunderstood your tool, thinking it was like a tool I made a little over a year ago that creates new fonts from existing font glyph paths, combining them in a…
      ycombiredd on HN
  • CSS @font-face unicode-range tricks

    From 1 comment
    • 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
      california-og on HN
  • Paranoia Sans self-censoring font

    From 1 comment
    • There is a lot of fun stuff you can do with fonts. A friend of mine made a self-censoring font: Paranoia Sans https://github.com/flegfleg/Paranoia-Sans
      Fliwatt on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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