June 24, 2026
Fonts, fury, and one savage CSS jab
Vector Graphics in Lil
Old-school computer lettering sparks big ideas, CSS jokes, and demands for more
TLDR: The article shows how Lil, a quirky scripting language, can draw old-school computer letters as simple line shapes and then transform them on screen. Commenters immediately split between wanting even wilder text-warping tricks and joking that the whole thing basically looks like CSS in disguise.
A deep dive into vector lettering in the Lil scripting language should have been a quiet little explainer about how computers can draw letters using lines and points. Instead, the vibe in the room quickly became: wait, this tiny demo is either secretly brilliant or suspiciously close to something people already know. The article walks readers through how old digital fonts from the 1960s can be rebuilt as simple line drawings, then stretched, combined, and drawn on a canvas in Decker. In plain English: it’s about teaching a computer to sketch letters from scratch, one line at a time.
But the real action is in the reactions. One camp was instantly hungry for more, with GL26 basically throwing down a challenge: if this line-based text play is possible, then why stop there? They want wild text-bending tricks next, hinting that the current demo is only the opening act. That gave the whole thread a classic internet energy: cool post, now do something even crazier.
Then came the drive-by zinger from teddyh: “Looks like CSS.” And honestly, that one-liner did what one-liners do best — it reframed the whole thing as a familiar web-design headache in a fake mustache. It’s part joke, part roast, part compliment, depending on how defensive you feel. So while the article is technically about old fonts and a quirky programming language, the community turned it into a mini-drama about whether this is elegant digital art, a gateway to weirder experiments, or just another way to rediscover the same layout chaos with extra steps.
Key Points
- •The article connects Decker’s `hershey` module to the early line-segment digital typefaces created by Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey and published in 1967.
- •It defines Lil’s core vector-graphics structures as points `(x,y)`, strokes as lists of points, and paths as lists of strokes.
- •`hershey.textpath[]` generates a path from a string and a font, and the resulting strokes can be rendered with `canvas.line[]`.
- •The article highlights Decker’s preference for collective operations, showing that drawing whole polylines avoids manual point-to-point line management.
- •Lil supports path concatenation and uniform scaling through list operations, but non-uniform scaling is less direct because of how `*` conforms mismatched list lengths.