'Sans Bullshit Sans' Is the Font That Nukes Buzzwords from Prose

​As someone with an interest in technology and the things that people write about technology, you are surely well enough aware of the torrents of absolute bullshit that pervade our merry culture. We are flanked daily and on all sides by gurus and makers and shifting paradigms and blanksourcing and etc. There is an epidemic of tech-speak in which people are absolutely terrified of saying what a thing actually is in the real-world. This will someday soon be recalled as one of the more shallow symptoms of the imminent bursting bubble, but in the meantime it's just a bunch of extra noise.

Meet​ Sans Bullshit Sans, a font designed to nuke bullshit buzzterms from prose, replacing them with comic sans stickers. And it's an actual font, not an intervening script or CSS interpretation. You can ​download and use it as a webfont right away.

Roel Nieskens, a front-end developer usually operating under the ​Pixel Ambacht name, used OpenType, which is Microsoft's extremely common font format. "Font hacking" seems like a reasonable way to describe the task, and it all began with the open-source font Droid Sans, which offers a license allowing typographers to make modifications to and reuse it for whatever, including bullshit.

So, Nieskens dove in.

Hacking a font isn't an easy thing, it seems, requiring the decoding/recoding of a whole series of dense tables containing the font's every little detail and behavior. Nieskens ​describes the whole process here and it's actually pretty interesting and technical.

The gist is in the usage of OpenType's ligature types. In typography, a ligature is just a series of characters or character traits ("glyphs") that smooshed together can be considered a single unit. A classic example is the ampersand "&," which is actually a paired Latin "e" and "t," but there's no reason it can't be extended to whole words or sets of words, like "actionable" or "freemium" or "vertical cross-pollination."

With a trio of stickers in hand, Nieskens needed to make both the ligatures themselves (​250 of them) and a lookup table where they could be found with the appropriate sticker replacement. The result is ready-to-go, and should work with most browsers, though, as noted, browser support of OpenType ligatures is still spotty.