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points by davidbarker 4 days ago | 0 comments

I wanted to make a faithful recreation of the original WordArt so I went through the various screenshots I could find and tweaked the built-in styles by eye. It's pretty fun to play with, and I didn't realise it would take me back to sitting in the ICT computer rooms at my school in the late '90s.

Enjoy!

And please feel free to share anything you make with me — I'd love to see. (Contact details in the help menu.)

[–] pjmlp 3 days ago

Thanks, but if fails short without a dot matrix printer to go alongside it, to print out those hanging banners. :)

[–] nether1 2 days ago

Good old dot matrix. That dot matrix print noise is etched in my brain forever

[–] poglet 4 days ago

Brought back many memories. There were also some fonts that added 'shimmer' and 'sparkle' text. You didn't run up a Win98 VM and install the old Word? Great job at making it all by screenshots and eye.

[–] davidbarker 4 days ago

Wonderful.

I never thought of that, actually. Perhaps I should as I don't remember shimmer or sparkle. I'll see if I can find some examples (if you happen to know of any I can reference please send them over).

[–] akx 4 days ago

Here -- they were effects you could add on regular text:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RHbP2Q7A-Wg

(I still find it mind-boggling that Word 2000 runs mostly just fine on a MacBook with an entirely different OS and processor architecture via Whisky/Wine.)

[–] TomGarden 3 days ago

Man, whenever I see nostaligic things like this I remember how instantly responsive computers used to feel. Good times.

[–] QuantumNomad_ 3 days ago

Very nice! Would you consider making it open source and sharing it on GitHub? I’d love to be able to easily install it locally on my machine and also to reuse the retro look of it for my own other local tools.

[–] EGreg 3 days ago

What if you ask your AI to make it for you based on the site?

Also, the Web is already open source

[–] az09mugen 3 days ago

While I totally get why you say AI can make it for you based on the site in this case, I sense we slowly but surely are moving from "code is the foundation" to "who cares about the code, AI can rewrite it anyway", as if AI in the future will be the only source of truth and you just don't have to worry to know things

[–] QuantumNomad_ 3 days ago

The web is source available, and only partly. When I say open source I mean a permissive license like MIT, ISC, etc.

[–] logicallee 3 days ago

>Also, the Web is already open source

Maybe. What does the license/signed contract if you have one say?

[–] segmondy 3 days ago

This is pretty awesome! Thanks for sharing. I was playing with it and had to stop! Brings back lots of good memories.

[–] hotelsacher 3 days ago

I feel like I should be able to crash the Windows behind this page by triggering some bug in the app.

[–] brynnb 3 days ago

You can by attempting one or two of the actions on my site :)

https://brynnbateman.com/

[–] kleiba2 3 days ago

Wow, that landing page was instant nostalgia for me. Well done!