Man Dupont has designed a typeface with a distinction: it renders your textual content as it will seem on an oscilloscope tuned in to a serial bus.

“Scopin’ Sans: [an] open supply typeface JUST for {hardware} nerds,” Dupont writes of his creationm. “See your textual content because it was meant to be seen (as serial knowledge on an oscilloscope). The typeface is completely generated utilizing Python (through FontForge and a few SVG libraries!) My script presently spits out three variations: Regular; FastBaud (compressed horizontally); [and] NoNoise (plain ol’ sq. waves, child.)”

Anybody armed with an oscilloscope and a tool that talks serial can be acquainted with the sq. wave: probing a serial bus in the course of the technique of communication exhibits peaks and valleys of various lengths, which may be decoded by the discerning eye into the message being transmitted on the time. Naturally, the excessive velocity of even the oldest of serial buses imply that transcription by eye is not the best way to go — which is why trendy oscilloscopes include protocol analyzers to do the arduous give you the results you want.

However what if you wish to go the opposite method, not turning an oscilloscope hint into textual content however textual content into an oscilloscope hint? That is the place Scopin’ Sans is available in: choose from the three fonts — two of which have synthetic noise injected into the “sign” to higher mimic a real oscilloscope hint, the final of which is noise-free pure sq. waves — and sort your textual content to see it not in conventional glyphs however bouncing sq. waves.

To higher display the undertaking, Dupont has put collectively a easy web site: enter textual content within the field and see it reproduced on the animated oscilloscope beneath, repeating on a everlasting loop. The three fonts are equipped in TrueType (TTF) and Internet Open Font Format 2 (WOFF2) codecs, to be used on-line or off, below the Open Font License 1.1 — and Dupont has additionally launched the supply code to generate them, below the permissive MIT license, on GitHub.