Glyphus

Procedurally generated glyphs

What is it?

Glyphus is an alphabet created with the aim of being both very optimized and beautiful.

Each glyph represents one word, and each word is represented by one glyph. But all of them are generated in such a way that you can learn how to read it with some training, based on simple rules, without having to remember each glyph signification.

Why?

Cyrano de Bergerac : Que dites-vous ?... C’est inutile ?... Je le sais !

Mais on ne se bat pas dans l’espoir du succès !

Non ! non, c’est bien plus beau lorsque c’est inutile !

Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand, acte V, scène 6

Is it a typeface?

Not really. According to Wikipedia, a typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol.. Here a glyph represents a full word. Furthermore, Glyphus can not be stored in a TrueType font format (ie. .ttf) for technical reasons and works in the browser with Javascript.

Trying Glyphus now

Just go to the online demo page!

Running Glyphus website locally

1. Get the repository:

• option a: by cloning it: git clone https://framagit.org/roipoussiere/glyphus.git
• option b: by downloading the archive: download the zip archive (or chose other archive formats from the download button on the repository page), then extract this archive.

2. Open website/index.html with you favorite web browser.

Contributing

Thank you for you interest! ❤️ You can contribute to Glyphus in several ways.

Talk around you

If you like the project, please share it to people, whether it is on you favorite social media or away from keyboard.

Discuss or provide feedback

If you are a typography enthusiast, type designer, speech therapist, or you think that we can have interesting talks in some way, I definitely want to hear you!

You can either contact me directly (see contact section below) or create an issue on GitLab.

Send pull requests

Please discuss with me before starting a pull request. ;)

For the rest, as usual, fork the repository, create a new branch, do you modifications, then create a pull request on GitLab.

Don't forget to test your code before sending a pull request (see code section below).

Code

Here we go.

You can start some hackings project after downloaded it (see Running Glyphus website locally above) without other setups.

Dependencies

npm is required to execute the build scripts used to test code, provides a general-purpose package and publish the demo website.

Create a package and publish

These steps are executed by the continuous integration to publish the website:

npm install
npm run build

This will package glyphus as a library in dist, then create a web folder in public used in production.

Test

Test your code with npm test? This which will run eslint according to the rules defined in .eslintrc.

Then open public/index.html with your favorite web browser to check that everything works properly. Note the public instead of website, which use packaged version of Glyphus that aims to be published on npm.

In order to avoid mistakes, you can create a git hook that executes npm test before each commit (also works before each push with pre-push):

echo 'npm run build' > .git/hooks/pre-commit
chmod u+x .git/hooks/pre-commit

Publish

You may be interested my the npm start command, that starts a web server and serve the Glyphus website at http://127.0.0.1:8080/. This is required to test the web page on some browsers like Chromium, which blocks the glyphus import.

If port 8080 is already used, you can define an other with npm config set glyphus:port <port>.

Contact

• roipoussiere at protonmail dot com;
• Mastodon;
• Twitter;

Licence

MIT