Show HN: QR code renderer in a TrueType font

ffoodevl 4 days ago 12 commentsRead Article on qr.jim.sh

In the "Libre Barcode Project" discussion yesterday, 1bpp asked: "Is anyone willing to sacrifice their sanity for the sake of implementing a QR renderer as TTF hinting code?"

Yes. I had some tokens to burn and was curious... turns out, it's possible. This was put together by a mix of Gemini, GPT, and Claude (depending on which usage limits kept running out).

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Discussion (12 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

layer8•about 3 hours ago

Side question: Why is nobody making QR codes on web pages clickable (regardless if it’s an image or text-based)? Not every QR code represents a URL, of course, but many do. Maybe there should be a qrcode URL scheme that lets browsers behave the same way as a camera scanning a QR code.

lifthrasiir•about 3 hours ago

See https://github.com/jimparis/qr-font/blob/master/design.md for the actual design. As who have written a QR code encoder library... I'm in shock and awe.

foodevl•4 days ago

1bpp's comment suggesting this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682460

WenboS•3 days ago

This is absolute black magic. I never realized OpenType rules were powerful enough to render something as complex as a QR matrix inline.

layer8•about 3 hours ago

It’s basically Turing-complete: https://simoncozens.github.io/fonts-and-layout/features.html

Once something is Turing-complete, the magic turns from black to white. ;)

giraffe_lady•about 3 hours ago

Font shaping rules are actually turing complete. An incredible amount of engineering effort has gone into this not being a total disaster everywhere at all times.

bigboss2700•3 days ago

That's a wonderfully cursed idea.

magnat•about 2 hours ago

Selecting parts of the code (in F7 mode or with SHIFT-LEFT/RIGHT) highlights which individual pixels corresponds to the actual letters.

jqpabc123•about 1 hour ago

Impressive work!

Not mentioned is the fact that the resulting QR Fonts are huge --- much larger than the javascript needed to render a QR code.

henryagi•about 1 hour ago

That's a wonderfully idea. I Like

red_hare•about 3 hours ago

Wow. This is so freaking cool.

1bpp•2 days ago

This is terrifying, great job!