Halftone

Halftone started as a joke and stayed useful for about eighteen months. You drop in a photograph, pick a font, and it redraws the image out of characters, weighting each glyph by how much ink it puts on the page.

The measurement problem

The interesting part is not the drawing, it is deciding how dark a letter is. There is no metric for that. I ended up rendering every glyph in the font to an offscreen canvas at 64 pixels, summing the alpha channel, and normalising the result — which sounds obvious and took three attempts, because a glyph's ink density depends on the box you measure it in, and the obvious box is the wrong one for anything with a descender.

Why it is archived

It works. It has no bugs I know of. Nobody, including me, has opened it in a year, and a tool that nobody opens should say so on the tin rather than pretend to be maintained. The source is still up and the demo still runs.

I keep it listed because roughly a third of the emails I get about my work are about this, which is a useful reminder that the thing you are proud of and the thing people use are rarely the same thing.