Copy-Paste Fonts Are Not Fonts. Here Is What Broke My Code
This is part 4 of my beginner journey. In part 1 I did not know what to learn first. In part 2 I stopped overthinking and picked a project: Fonti, a free copy-paste font generator. In part 3 I chose my tools (Astro, Git, Cloudflare Pages) and promised the next post would be about the actual build. NOTE: I renamed the project from Fontly to Fonti since part 3. Same tool, better name. This is that…
This article, part 4 of a beginner coding journey, explains the limitations of copy-paste fonts and the real purpose of Fonti, a free font generator. The author initially thought the app would apply styles and allow users to copy-paste them onto social media. However, they soon discovered that fonts cannot survive copying and pasting.
Instead, the process involves converting text into a set of characters that mimic the styles of bold, italic, script, and other font variations. These characters are stored in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Unicode block, which contains 1024 slots, 996 of them in use. Social media users discovered these characters and began using them for eye-catching bios.
The author's tool is not a font generator but a lookup table that maps text to these special characters. The article also discusses the existence of empty slots in the Unicode chart due to duplicate encoding, requiring an exception list to compensate for the missing characters.
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