July 7, 2026
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Jim's TrueType QR Code Font
A font that turns words into QR codes has people amazed, confused, and blaming Safari
TLDR: Jim made a font that turns bracketed words into QR codes, which is a clever visual trick with real downloadable files and a live demo. Commenters were split between calling it amazing and roasting Safari and iPhone bugs, especially because spaces seemed to break the codes.
A wildly nerdy little experiment somehow turned into pure comment-section theater: Jim built a font that can transform text inside square brackets into a scannable QR code, while the rest of the sentence stays readable like normal. So yes, you can type something like abc[hello]ghi and watch the middle morph into one of those black-and-white squares people usually scan for menus, tickets, and suspicious Wi-Fi passwords. On paper, it’s a clever stunt. In the comments, it became a mini browser scandal.
The loudest reaction was basically: this is brilliant, but why is Safari acting like it’s never seen a space before? Multiple people piled on to say bracketed text with spaces broke on iPhone and Safari, with one commenter flatly declaring, “Spaces are definitely broken in Safari.” Another said even one of the built-in examples failed on iOS, which instantly gave the project that classic internet-launch energy: dazzling demo meets chaotic real-world testing. Add in a quick “[dupe]” callout linking to an earlier post, and suddenly the comments had everything—nitpicking, platform drama, and the timeless sport of being first to yell “already posted.”
Still, not everyone came to throw tomatoes. One admirer summed up the other side of the mood: maybe it’s not useful every day, but it’s amazing that a font can be twisted into doing something this weird at all. That’s the vibe here: half the crowd is filing bug reports, half is applauding the magic trick, and everyone’s a little delighted that a humble font sparked such a ridiculous amount of chaos.
Key Points
- •The project generates experimental OpenType font files that render bracket-delimited text as QR codes while preserving readable surrounding text.
- •Three font variants are provided—1-L, 2-L, and 3-L—with capacities of up to 17, 32, and 53 printable ASCII characters respectively.
- •The default build generates glyph outlines and GSUB feature logic, including delimiter parsing, byte expansion, Reed-Solomon parity, QR module placement, and fixed mask rendering.
- •Printable ASCII glyphs outside QR blocks are copied from Liberation Sans Regular, and the generated font families are named QR Font 1-L, QR Font 2-L, and QR Font 3-L due to font-name licensing constraints.
- •The repository includes build commands, a web demo, generated feature files, and notes that the proof of concept requires an environment that supports OpenType shaping with GSUB features.