Typefaces undergo a complex degradation procedure to be displayed as accurately as possible on screen via bitmap font files. Written in Macromedia Director, the PostBitmapScripter (PBS) type generator attempts to work the opposite way by using a simplistic enhancement routine to attempt a recreation of the original typeface from bitmap sources. PBS’s resulting letterforms expose the flawed translation process and celebrate the eccentricity of its limited amplification algorithm.
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) :
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-JK-‘ 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