SoylentNews
SoylentNews is people
https://soylentnews.org/

Title    Fontastic Programming — Addition Font
Date    Thursday March 14 2019, @04:44AM
Author    chromas
Topic   
from the the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/03/14/0052253

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

Links

  1. "martyb" - https://soylentnews.org/~martyb/
  2. "Turing complete" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
  3. "Proving the Turing Completeness of Fonts" - https://litherum.blogspot.com/2019/03/addition-font.html
  4. "Google drive" - https://drive.google.com/file/d/14oNfNM1aYmgq3r8f50SmIHWQHz08HMWx/view?usp=sharing
  5. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=32309

© Copyright 2024 - SoylentNews, All Rights Reserved

printed from SoylentNews, Fontastic Programming — Addition Font on 2024-03-28 17:07:15