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Comment by interroboink | Hacker News Reader

I thought somehow the animation was playing "by itself," but I guess it was accomplished by holding down the '.' key? The font code swaps a run of N dots with the glyph corresponding to the Nth frame of animation.

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Fontemon [0] makes this a bit more obvious by including a web page with the font embedded, so we can control the animation by typing, rather than watching someone else type. However, mmulet embeds some sort of Blender project [1], rather than a wasm binary to accomplish the font shaping.

[0] https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html

[1] https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/Tuto...

So, the blender project was just used to create the game (set up each decision tree, and the position of all images), from there I compile everything into complex ligatures in the GSUB table. The wasm binary feature wasn’t around when I made fontemon, but it looks like it would have made development a lot easier!

Yeah in retrospect I really should have added something like a overlay so it was possible to see what keys I pressed.

As someone completely ignorant of the inner working of fonts, how is this different from ligatures? Those also produce special glyphs based on combinations.

It's exactly ligatures. I presume the author avoided that term so you didn't confuse it with the ligatures that are included in Unicode.

Yes this is exactly ligature, I just became aware that it was possible to use wasm for them in HarfBuzz, if you want to see some wasm examples that is not possible with ligatures have a look at https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples

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