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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @08:13AM (2 children)
you know when people say "this is why we can't have nice things"?
this is the sort of nice thing that they are talking about...
by the way, LaTeX is also Turing complete, and this means that you can also do fun things with it:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29402/how-do-i-make-my-document-look-like-it-was-written-by-a-cthulhu-worshipping-madm [stackexchange.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:15PM
Dang, those are some impressive modifications!
(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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