Guy Dupont's Scopin' Sans Is a Font for Hardware Hackers, Rendering Text as an Oscilloscope Trace

Guy Dupont has designed a typeface with a difference: it renders your text as it would appear on an oscilloscope tuned in to a serial bus.

"Scopin' Sans: [an] open source typeface JUST for hardware nerds," Dupont writes of his creationm. "See your text as it was meant to be seen (as serial data on an oscilloscope). The typeface is entirely generated using Python (via FontForge and some SVG libraries!) My script currently spits out three variations: Normal; FastBaud (compressed horizontally); [and] NoNoise (plain ol' square waves, baby.)"

Anyone armed with an oscilloscope and a device that talks serial will be familiar with the square wave: probing a serial bus during the process of communication shows peaks and valleys of different lengths, which can be decoded by the discerning eye into the message being transmitted at the time. Naturally, the high speed of even the oldest of serial buses mean that transcription by eye isn't the way to go — which is why modern oscilloscopes come with protocol analyzers to do the hard work for you.

But what if you want to go the other way, not turning an oscilloscope trace into text but text into an oscilloscope trace? That's where Scopin' Sans comes in: select from the three fonts — two of which have artificial noise injected into the "signal" to better mimic a true oscilloscope trace, the last of which is noise-free pure square waves — and type your text to see it not in traditional glyphs but bouncing square waves.

To better demonstrate the project, Dupont has put together a simple website: enter text in the box and see it reproduced on the animated oscilloscope beneath, repeating on a permanent loop. The three fonts are supplied in TrueType (TTF) and Web Open Font Format 2 (WOFF2) formats, for use online or off, under the Open Font License 1.1 — and Dupont has also released the source code to generate them, under the permissive MIT license, on GitHub.