2.4 KiB
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, 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 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. 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. 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.