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from the the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts dept.
What if someone discovered that the specifications in a font file could be Turing complete? What if that person realized that a font could, therefore, perform computations. How about addition?
Proving the Turing Completeness of Fonts:
The goal is:
I wanted to try to implement addition. The input glyph stream would be of the form "=1234+5678=" and the shaping process would turn that string into "6912".
The sheer number of details precludes a simple summary. Mix a little recursion with a strong helping of remapping to implement some grammar productions and voila! The font file is available on Google drive.
What "creative" [mis]applications of this technology can you think of? Define a font file that has a 1:1 mapping of all ASCII characters... except replace all instances of "123" with "456". How could you recognize this had happened to you?
Consider: embedding it in a web page or a PDF document. Making it a new (default) printer font.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday March 14 2019, @07:35PM
Uh, yeah? LaTeX is a programming language for typesetting, of course it's Turing complete. Or rather, LaTeX is just a macro package written on top of TeX which is Turing complete. Of course a macro package written on top of a Turing complete language is Turing complete.
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