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Posted by RohanAdwankar 2 days ago

A font that reads what you wrote(rohanadwankar.github.io)
85 points | 42 comments
AnthonBerg 13 hours ago|
The idea is amazing, and… how to say it?; The results are horrible to read in the same way as AI writing when AI writing is bad.†

And I mean this in the best possible way. It's really interesting.

There's this feeling of an intrusive forcing of something. A feeling that things don't… breathe? Feels like one already sifts out this sort of semantic weight when reading and to me the highlighting adds strange janky emotional-processing noise to the text; Uncomfortable and somewhat… dissonant?

It's really, really interesting. I hate how disparaging to the project this comes out!! my apologies for that! I LOVE the project and what it reveals about text comprehension and perception of saliency and rhythm in written text!

(† footnote: feels like this to me)

RohanAdwankar 8 hours ago||
Thanks this is such a thoughtful comment! This project was definitely more to explore the idea than to make it certain that this was the answer. I think my goal was more so from the perspective of if text is streaming by very fast like it would be for an agent is there anything we can do to make it easier to read. The answer may genuinely be no but I think if we can get to something where the program highlights things accurately then in theory the reader could skim faster. I remember debaters who have to speak/read very fast highlight and format the sources (https://youtu.be/0FPsEwWT6K0?t=121&is=7fFn3BjKUnJKPXu3) so in theory it may be helpful for high speed cases. But I definitely agree with your point that it would be annoying if for example a book was formatted in this way haha
great_tankard 9 hours ago||
i completely agree with this. it's a very cool idea and also i hope nobody uses it in actual writing
frereubu 13 hours ago||
Not working in Firefox. I get this error:

  Uncaught TypeError: The specifier “semfont/analyze” was a bare specifier, but was not remapped to anything. Relative module specifiers must start with “./”, “../” or “/”.
Works in Chrome though.
jstanley 13 hours ago||
Here was me thinking it just didn't do anything at all.
RohanAdwankar 9 hours ago|||
Thanks for calling that out! Someone from here has fixed it: https://github.com/RohanAdwankar/RohanAdwankar.github.io/pul... Thanks Jakub!
AndyNemmity 9 hours ago||
yup, just broken for me.
skrebbel 8 hours ago||
This isn't a font, it's just a JS lib that colors text based on semantic analysis. Submission title oversells it by a lot.
RohanAdwankar 1 hour ago|
My bad on the title, I was trying to think of a good name to describe what it was intuitively but couldn’t figure it out at the time. Wasnt trying to be clickbaity
tensegrist 12 hours ago||
i thought the computation was within the font itself

like

https://github.com/RoelN/SansBullshitSans https://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/chartwell/ https://github.com/trishume/numderline

which can be taken rather far

https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html

RohanAdwankar 8 hours ago|
woah i didnt know this was a thing thanks for sharing!!
brk 12 hours ago||
Seems to require Chrome? In Firefox it's just a text box, nothing happens. Was confused at first about what it was supposed to do, the rest of the page made it clear it was supposed to mess about with whatever text you write.

Trying it in Chrome and seeing the results I'm not sure that it is really that helpful. Has undertones of elementary school grammar lessons highlighting words in sentences.

_grilled_cheese 1 hour ago||
This reminds me of the "Geronimo Stilton" children's books.

https://archive.org/details/geronimo-stilton_202107/Creepell...

rob74 12 hours ago||
Cool, but I hope it doesn't catch on. Otherwise I can already hear managers complaining to people that they have too many red words and not enough green words in their emails/Slack messages/whatever...
mkrecny 11 hours ago||
IMO this is a big idea - whether this particular implementation is good or not is not that important.
smugglerFlynn 9 hours ago|
This implementation is tune-able. One idea that comes to mind is setting up e.g. salience scores for different company-internal lingo and names of internal components and teams, enriching wiki / chats / tickets / logs this way for quicker and more accurate skimming.
amelius 10 hours ago||
Well, at least we're not yet at "a font that reports back to its vendor what you read".
hhh 10 hours ago|
great idea!
wccrawford 13 hours ago|
This is a really neat idea. I'm not sure it's actually useful, but it's definitely neat.

And it made me think of the new kid in town: Jev. I wonder if Jev can do this well and quickly? Not that I'm willing to pay the tokens even to find out, but it's another neat thought.

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