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Sunday, November 24, 2024

Man Dupont’s Scopin’ Sans Is a Font for {Hardware} Hackers, Rendering Textual content as an Oscilloscope Hint



Man Dupont has designed a typeface with a distinction: it renders your textual content as it will seem on an oscilloscope tuned in to a serial bus.

“Scopin’ Sans: [an] open supply typeface JUST for {hardware} nerds,” Dupont writes of his creationm. “See your textual content because it was meant to be seen (as serial knowledge on an oscilloscope). The typeface is completely generated utilizing Python (by way of FontForge and a few SVG libraries!) My script at the moment spits out three variations: Regular; FastBaud (compressed horizontally); [and] NoNoise (plain ol’ sq. waves, child.)”

Anybody armed with an oscilloscope and a tool that talks serial will probably be accustomed to the sq. wave: probing a serial bus through the strategy of communication exhibits peaks and valleys of various lengths, which will be decoded by the discerning eye into the message being transmitted on the time. Naturally, the excessive pace of even the oldest of serial buses imply that transcription by eye is not the way in which to go — which is why trendy oscilloscopes include protocol analyzers to do the onerous be just right for you.

Scopin’ Sans allows you to see what your textual content would seem like as a serial bus probed by an oscilloscope — no wires required. (📹: Man Dupont)

However what if you wish to go the opposite approach, not turning an oscilloscope hint into textual content however textual content into an oscilloscope hint? That is the place Scopin’ Sans is available in: choose from the three fonts — two of which have synthetic noise injected into the “sign” to higher mimic a real oscilloscope hint, the final of which is noise-free pure sq. waves — and sort your textual content to see it not in conventional glyphs however bouncing sq. waves.

To higher display the mission, Dupont has put collectively a easy web site: enter textual content within the field and see it reproduced on the animated oscilloscope beneath, repeating on a everlasting loop. The three fonts are equipped in TrueType (TTF) and Net Open Font Format 2 (WOFF2) codecs, to be used on-line or off, beneath the Open Font License 1.1 — and Dupont has additionally launched the supply code to generate them, beneath the permissive MIT license, on GitHub.

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