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Fontastic Programming — Addition Font

posted by chromas on Thursday March 14 2019, @04:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts dept.

martyb writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by KritonK on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:32AM (2 children)

    by KritonK (465) on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:32AM (#814135)

    I installed the font, fired up LibreOffice, typed =1234+5678= and changed its font to AdditionFont. All I got was =1234+5678= displayed in a dot-matrixey font, not 6912.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:29PM (#814153)

    You need a hacked harfbuzz and to be using an app using it.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:01PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:01PM (#814462)

      So ... then the font isn't turing complete per se. The font is only a syntax for a turing complete language that can be used in specific applications. Seams pretty boring to me.