Added animation, timelapse and red color today!

https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/

@t36s
Hah glad to hear that! If you make anything cool, please share! I haven't even used it myself much yet, so its latent potentials are still very much unknown.

My new visual poetry and experimental typography tool is out now in beta! It lets you drop letters on a canvas with collision detection.
https://hlnet.neocities.org/il-verse/

Let me know what you think!

Some early tests

My new visual poetry / experimental writing editor is almost ready to be shared! With it, you "drop" characters in a straight path (up, down, left or right) until it collides with another letter.

More collision fun

@timahrens
That's true, still thinking what's the best solution to that. Maybe some kind of adaptive tracking based on how occupied the edge area is or something.

Quick collision demo with matter.js

@nicksherman @ANRT
I forgot to ask, what browser were you using when taking the screencast? The spacing is bugging out, but it looks as intended in my testing with Safari, Chrome and Firefox on Mac.

@behdad That's a smart way of doing that! Seems to produce really good results too.

@Okay
That's true! Forgot about bubblekern. So mine is like bubblekern but fully automatic.

@lowtech
Hmm, I've never noticed anything like that in any font data I've inspected, but maybe I haven't dug deep enough. Do you remember where you've seen something like that? Kerning pairs, bearings and advance widths is how I understand kerning typically works.

But anyway, I made this because it works with any vector shape, wheter it is a font or not. I already use a version of it in my experimental font editor and text layout tools to skip the manual kerning process.

Working on a new autokerning script.

It's based on a simple idea: fit glyphs as close to each other as possible based on the actual vector shape, so they're just about touching, but don't collide. Then add tracking.

But, depending on the desired effect, this can create too much overlap in combinations like "C-" where the dash would go completely inside the C shape. This is fixed by add a big bounding box that's some percentage of the original shape, and acts as a minimum bounding box size. This works quite nicely, so that combinations like AT, LY, etc. are not overkerned.

Here's debug images showing how the collision is actually detected. I parse the SVG path and create a binary tree of bounding boxes based on it. Then just do simple rectangle collision checks.

Inspired by the syntax highlighting font by @gdc, I have developed an OpenType colour font with built-in syntax highlighting of TeX documents. This was presented at the TUG2025 conference.

Some details and more links in the blog post: https://rajeeshknambiar.wordpress.com/2025/12/27/a-font-with-built-in-tex-syntax-highlighting/

In this interactive web demo, @gdc shows an alternate method for text justification, called “cogent” or “semi-justified” alignment, where each line is justified if possible within a range of spacing limits, but left-aligned otherwise:
https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/semi-justified-text/

Fraser Muggeridge gave a great related talk at @ANRT this year, focused on an example from Herbert Bayer:
https://vimeo.com/1059643515
(Unfortunately the video is cut off at the end.)

Does anyone know other examples of this technique in use?

Experimenting with a pixel-fattening algorithm. This one is has a bug, but a very interesting one!

@yann_t @Okay
I guess I should have clarified, I meant practically impossible. As I mentioned, you could also do all this by hand, but nobody does because it's a pain. The same goes for scripting.

I'm interested in this question because wouldn't it be wonderful if it wasn't a pain: what kind of design would there be in the world if we could do more experimental stuff like this. Now, everything looks like Adobe. Software should enrich our imagination, not limit it.

@adelfaure That's a great idea! I only tested with a square, circle and diamond patterns but didn't think of trying something more funky like this. Will give it a go at some point. Cool experiment :)

@Okay
Yeah, but the indesign scripting docs are so bad that its very unpractical.

@kentlew

this is great, thank you for sharing! With newer indesign and some new variable font you could even combine this with optical sizing.