



I created an Illustrator script that types a letter (in this case, ‘J’ & ‘K’) using every font installed on a computer. It aligns all the letters and then cuts slices out of each letter based on width. The collections are the results of 18 computers that friends and I tried this on. They range from 97 to 6607 fonts.
If you’d like to try this on your computer:
Pre-requisites:
- Adobe Illustrator (CS or CS2. This may or may not work on CS3. If it doesn’t, let me know exactly what happened and I can try to debug.)
- Some patience (amount depends on size of font collection)
- Willingness to e-mail me the two files when you are done
- Acceptance that this may produce an error and not work for you the first time
How to use the Slitscan type generator (as verbosely as I can think) :
- Download the Slitscan zip file
- Unzip it. This will extract two files: a jpeg of what your output should look like, and a javascript file (.jsx) that Illustrator will use.
- Open Illustrator
- Go to the ‘File‘ Menu and choose ‘Scripts‘ >> ‘Other Scripts…‘
- Navigate to the unzipped javascript file titled ‘J_K_slitscan_script.jsx‘ and select it.
- Wait
- When an alert pops up telling you how many fonts Illustrator thinks you have, click ‘OK‘
- There will be two files that remain open in Illustrator and should look similar to the jpeg file. Look at them if you feel so inclined, but don’t touch!
- Close the files
- Navigate to your home folder or do a search for ‘Slitscan‘
- There should be two files with the prefix ‘Slitscan-‘ in your home folder
- If you can, zip or stuff them into one archive file.
- E-mail me the archive file. Please use ‘Slitscan’ as the subject line (this way I should see it if my e-mail program labels as spam).
- Wait again
- I run another set of scripts on this file which will get a final result.
- I will e-mail you the two files back so you can have them for posterity’s sake. You are free to use them however and wherever you like as well.
- Bask in the warm feeling that you are a vital component of this project