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I did kinda the opposite and instead of making a font out of tetris I made a font play Tetris.

I did it with the Harfbuzz shaper which now have experimental support for embedding WebAssembly programs to shape fonts.

Talk where I show it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms1Drb9Vw9M

Source code: https://github.com/Erk-/programmable-fonts

You can also see actual uses of this WebAssembly embedding to show that is not just for fun here: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples




Awesome.

This is precisely the sort of beautiful thing I love finding on HN.[a]

Your work put a smile on my face.

Thank you for sharing it here!

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[a] For those here who only want to see the demo, it starts at 22:50: https://youtu.be/Ms1Drb9Vw9M?t=1370

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PS. I also submitted your demo to HN. I think it deserves its own post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40737961


I liked how you set your bio in the "About" section, kind of circular dependencies :)


Or recursion :)


Coolest thing I've seen so far this year. Demo starts at 22:55 but the whole presentation is worth watching.


I agree. Watched the whole thing and the entire video is worth it.-

(The "historical exploration" of type, and typesetting, even if an introduction, is great ...)


Incredible ...

(The Tetris pieces going up upon backspace are a riot :)


You can even play Pokemon using fonts: https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html


You demo the result in GIMP (with a Wasm runtime linked(?)) and in the font viewer FontGoogles, and there's someone else who is playing around with it in gedit. There's no way to make use of this in, say, Firefox, yet, even though it ships with Harfbuzz, right?


I could not get it to work when I looked into it last, for Gimp I actually installed it globally, I think neither Chrome or Firefox uses the system Harfbuzz. Going by the dependants of Harfbuzz on Arch [0] it might be possible that it works in Chromium with a custom Harfbuzz, but it is not something I have tried. And since it is still experimental it is not built by default in any distribution I know of.

[0]: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/harfbuzz/


Gotcha, thanks champ!


thats absolutely bananas, awesome job. The bad apple showcase is great too.


That was the first part I did, I wrote a blog about it here [0].

At the time it was also discussed on here at [1].

[0]: https://blog.erk.dev/posts/anifont/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317055



This is fantastic! These days, we have learned that no product can be taken seriously if it doesn't use LLMs somehow, so also based on Harfbuzz-Wasm, here's a font which is also an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791


Nice demo. Really kicks all the "bytecode can never be fast --- we have to AOT everything" people in the teeth, doesn't it?




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