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by vog 3499 days ago
> What is this useful for?

I suspect it may be used to enforce custom fonts in an old-fashioned way, but nowadays you would simply deliver the font with you site, or use a font service.

Or, it could serve as some kind of "copy-protection", but it would not protect against OCR.

Thinking more about it, this may be a diabolic way to collect strings from people who want to make them "copy-protectable". So you don't need OCR anymore, but fetch them from the source. ;-)

Either way, it's a nice project with a good execution!
5 comments
kbr 3499 days ago
Well, I mainly made this after seeing people on Twitter tweet out code perfectly formatted and highlighted, but it's just a screenshot of their text editor.

So basically, the main use-case of Alter is that it lets you tweet code snippets that are a little over 140 characters that are formatted correctly.

It can also be used for more, such as "copy-protection", like you said above.

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imafish 3499 days ago
Cmon - don't call this a project. It is a single function. However, I like how OP realized that vanilla js was the correct choice for a simple job.
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kbr 3499 days ago
Haha, I agree, it's pretty small. If you look at my other projects, I <3 vanilla js.
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jupiter2 3499 days ago
> Either way, it's a nice project with a good execution!

I agree. Very quick too. I tried it with some ascii art and it makes the overall image a bit thinner, though:(

(not handling spaces correctly)

Image: https://sli.mg/ZSLtf6

Ascii Source: http://www.ascii-art.de/ascii/ghi/gary_larson.txt

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kbr 3499 days ago
Yes, I'm working on this.

The problem is that it finds the longest line, by the number of characters in it. Instead of taking the actual width.

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jupiter2 3499 days ago
This is great news. I can understand wanting to keep this as simple as possible but... if you decide to add any features:

1. Transparent Background (and)

2. Choice of character color (to integrate better with a webpage's color scheme, for example)

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tyingq 3499 days ago
Could also be useful, if extended with webfonts, for something like a custom T-shirt/mug/etc preview generator.
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sliken 3499 days ago
> What is this useful for?

Twitter.

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