Inspired by the syntax highlighting font by @gdc, I have developed an OpenType colour font with built-in syntax highlighting of TeX documents. This was presented at the TUG2025 conference.

Some details and more links in the blog post: https://rajeeshknambiar.wordpress.com/2025/12/27/a-font-with-built-in-tex-syntax-highlighting/

In this interactive web demo, @gdc shows an alternate method for text justification, called “cogent” or “semi-justified” alignment, where each line is justified if possible within a range of spacing limits, but left-aligned otherwise:
https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/semi-justified-text/

Fraser Muggeridge gave a great related talk at @ANRT this year, focused on an example from Herbert Bayer:
https://vimeo.com/1059643515
(Unfortunately the video is cut off at the end.)

Does anyone know other examples of this technique in use?

Experimenting with a pixel-fattening algorithm. This one is has a bug, but a very interesting one!

@yann_t @Okay
I guess I should have clarified, I meant practically impossible. As I mentioned, you could also do all this by hand, but nobody does because it's a pain. The same goes for scripting.

I'm interested in this question because wouldn't it be wonderful if it wasn't a pain: what kind of design would there be in the world if we could do more experimental stuff like this. Now, everything looks like Adobe. Software should enrich our imagination, not limit it.

@adelfaure That's a great idea! I only tested with a square, circle and diamond patterns but didn't think of trying something more funky like this. Will give it a go at some point. Cool experiment :)

@Okay
Yeah, but the indesign scripting docs are so bad that its very unpractical.

@kentlew

this is great, thank you for sharing! With newer indesign and some new variable font you could even combine this with optical sizing.

@raphael
That's very true. How is web-to-print nowadays? I know theres some exciting development happening on paged.js, but besides that? Are proper justification, textframes/css regions, cmyk/color profile support, foot-, end- and margin notes and running headers solved?

@raphael

Here's an example of run-on paragraps with spaces on both sides, used in Galería Gráfica from 1922. It's funky but interesting. Can't do this in InDesign AFAIK.

@raphael
No specific comparison, just in general. Things you wish it did but doesn't. But, for example, a similar effect to the the cascading font-size was done by Pierre-Simon Fournier for Modéles Des Caracteres De L'imprimerie in 1742. It's a cool effect I wish could be done in InDesign. Of course it's possible to do manually but thats beside the point

I'm listing things InDesign can't do. What am I missing?

1. Cascading font size e.g. down from 60pt to 10pt on first line.
2. Run-on paragraph with 2em space on both sides of the line.
3. NLP stuff like: bold every first syllable, or make every verb italic.
4. Rotate characters.
5. Custom paragraph composer
6. Extra spacing glue after sentence ends (so, space after periods could grow more than word spaces)
7. Any kind of parametric styling, like increase word weight each time it appears

@henry

@redintheshell

really nice! i've made a few similar experiments here also:
https://hlnet.neocities.org/svg-filters

too bad the its slow on long text! i hope browsers would put more effort into svg

@pitscher
:) the falling key opens the boxhead!

cellular auto

After letting this run for ~10 minutes, it seems to have stabilized into an oscillating pattern with around 5 states where the brighter and darker patches seem to "travel" across.

Video of the breadth-first search flood fill based cellular automata.

And by "discovered", I mean it literally: I was just test spamming the flood fill until patterns started to emerge! Dunno if this is a known cellular automata.

Accidentally discovered a flood fill based cellular automata while making a simple paint app.

I animated the flood fill (inspired by Mario Paint), so on click it slowly starts flooding in all four directions. But, when I placed two floods close together, they started colliding into each other, forming very organic looking patterns that ripple and shift. It's semi-stable: they can go for thousands of generations before eventually one floods "wins". Maybe some configurations are even stable?

What a great resource on amiga ASCII art by @gdc

https://blog.glyphdrawing.club/amiga-ascii-art/

@kst
@ammon

wow I had not seen that before, but it looks very interesting. Thank you for sharing!

And same, I really want web-to-print to become a viable alternative to InDesign. Maybe some day...