Bastardica
Create bastard web fonts
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HN · launched Sep 20, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 87%) · 0 views
Niche: typography and font tools · 123 launches, 7 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Content generation
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 123 launches in typography and font tools →
Could you build this?
Partial While the web UI is simple, programmatically manipulating OpenType font tables, glyph metrics, and ligature substitutions inside the browser with Pyodide/fontTools requires niche typographic domain knowledge.
What it would actually take: The stack utilizes Pyodide running Python's `fontTools` in WebAssembly, interfacing with browser JS to parse TTF/OTF tables, calculate bounding boxes, and inject custom GSUB (Glyph Substitution) `liga` lookups. The hard part is the font engineering: resolving overlapping glyph metrics, maintaining consistent baseline/ascent/descent ratios across disparate source fonts, and structuring OpenType layout feature code so browsers shape text correctly without glyph collision or corruption. This demands domain expertise in digital typography specifications and font table formats (CFF, glyf, GSUB).
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 1106 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #951 of 1107 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 324 days after the earliest competitor.
- Taetype · hn · 2026-07-13 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.68
- Text Generator · hn · 2025-10-31 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- Font Finder · hn · 2025-10-31 · 25 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- Font Fam · hn · 2026-10-26 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard · hn · 2026-09-23 · 857 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- furifont · github · 2026-10-12 · 210 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- craft-fonts · github · 2026-10-06 · 188 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- A custom font that displays Cistercian numerals using ligatures · hn · 2026-02-08 · 171 upvotes · similarity 0.56
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