The world looks so different now. The world looks so different now. The world looks so different now.
- -## Background - -One of my favourite music artists, [Jaron](https://youtu.be/GXvqQ5-P82I), released his album LIGHTYEARS a little over a year ago. For his visuals, he uses a variety of symbols in place of Latin letters, and there's a converter on [his website](https://jaronsteele.com/) too. Only problem is that my browser can't seem to display most of the characters because the characters aren't included in most fonts. - -That's why I made a font! It allows you to type Latin characters from `A-Z` as well as numbers `0-9` and `!?` in the LIGHTYEARS style. Like this: - -trans rights!
- -The font exclusively uses characters from the Noto font family. Many of the Noto varieties have been stitched together to recreate the whole LIGHTYEARS alphabet. - -To create the font, I used [FontForge](https://fontforge.org). Finding this tool was both a blessing and a curse, as it was exactly what I needed, but it kept. crashing. all. the. time. I tried both the AppImage as well as the release on `dnf` and both had the same issues. I managed to make it work, but it took a lot of patience. Eventually I figured out that importing Noto Maths gave me a 3-8 second window before the editor crashed. The project file would forget the imported font, but if I had copied any glyphs it would keep those. - -## Download & use - -[Download the font here](https://files.natconf.dev/public/lightyears.woff2). It's in the web-optimised `woff2` format and has most characters stripped to minimise its file size – it's less than 20 kilobytes in size! Uppercase and lowercase letters are the same. - -For use on your website, put the font into your resources/static/similar folder and then add this block of code to your CSS file: - -
-@font-face {
- font-family: "LIGHTYEARS";
- src: url("/fonts/lightyears.woff2");
- font-weight: 400;
- font-style: normal;
-}
-
-
-Then you can change any element's font by setting `font-family: 'LIGHTYEARS', sans-serif;`. Because it's the Latin characters and Arabic numbers that have been changed, you can type text in regular English and people can 'decrypt' the messages by copy-pasting the text somewhere else!
-
-You do **not** need Jaron's converter to type stylised text! The converter returns the actual symbols from other scripts, whereas this font only changes how letters look.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/src/routes/blog/posts.ts b/src/routes/blog/posts.ts
index 38828e7..98c8746 100644
--- a/src/routes/blog/posts.ts
+++ b/src/routes/blog/posts.ts
@@ -30,7 +30,10 @@ export enum BlogPostTag {
NULL = "all", // placeholder when a 'no tag' is needed. if in doubt, do not use this
ART = "art-stuff", // ramblings to do with art
DRAWING = "drawing", // self-explanatory
- IMADETHIS = "i-made-this", // stuff i made
+
+ // not used because of the new projects page serving this exact purpose
+ // IMADETHIS = "i-made-this", // stuff i made
+
META = "natconf-meta", // about the website itself
RANT = "rant", // self-explanatory
TECH_TIP = "tech-tip", // tech guides
@@ -80,20 +83,6 @@ export const posts: BlogPostLink[] = [
],
}
},
- {
- key: "2026/0325",
- post: {
- date: "2026-03-25",
- time: "22:22",
- banner: "banner.webp",
- bannerAlt: "A sunset captured from an Autobahn exit.",
- title: "I made a LIGHTYEARS font",
- description: "I feel electric and it's only getting brighter!",
- tags: [
- BlogPostTag.IMADETHIS,
- ],
- }
- },
{
key: "2026/0317",
post: {
@@ -151,7 +140,6 @@ export const posts: BlogPostLink[] = [
tags: [
BlogPostTag.ART,
BlogPostTag.DRAWING,
- BlogPostTag.IMADETHIS,
],
}
},
@@ -181,7 +169,6 @@ export const posts: BlogPostLink[] = [
tags: [
BlogPostTag.ART,
BlogPostTag.DRAWING,
- BlogPostTag.IMADETHIS,
],
}
},
diff --git a/static/blog/2026/0325/banner.webp b/static/blog/2026/0325/banner.webp
deleted file mode 100644
index 926aadb..0000000
Binary files a/static/blog/2026/0325/banner.webp and /dev/null differ