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 fully generated utilizing Python (by way of FontForge and a few SVG libraries!) My script at present 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 shall be accustomed to the sq. wave: probing a serial bus in the course of the strategy of communication reveals peaks and valleys of various lengths, which may 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 fashionable oscilloscopes include protocol analyzers to do the arduous be just right for you.
However what if you wish to go the opposite method, 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 raised mimic a real oscilloscope hint, the final of which is noise-free pure sq. waves — and kind your textual content to see it not in conventional glyphs however bouncing sq. waves.
To raised show the challenge, 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, underneath the Open Font License 1.1 — and Dupont has additionally launched the supply code to generate them, underneath the permissive MIT license, on GitHub.