Proof with What You've Drawn

Every type designer knows this moment. You have eleven letters drawn, you want to see them behave as words, and every proof text on earth assumes you have all twenty-six. So your new lowercase sits in a sentence full of holes, or you spend ten minutes inventing phrases that dodge the letters you haven’t drawn.

This problem has good prior art. Miguel Sousa’s adhesiontext.com takes the characters you have and gives back real words that use only those. The catch is the loop: export the font, visit the site, paste your characters, copy the words, paste them into your proof. Somewhere around the third new letter, you stop bothering. SIL’s fontproof class for the SILE typesetter gets closer, a real proof document rebuilt from your font file, but it lives on the command line and only re-runs when you do.

Hellbox 1.21 builds it into the proof. Click the wand under the content editor and the section’s text generates from your font’s drawn glyphs. Encoded-but-empty glyphs don’t count; a letter has to have outlines to make the cut, because a half-built font is full of placeholders that would render as blanks.

Hellbox already watches your Glyphs file, so the text grows as you draw. Save with a fresh k and words with k start appearing. RoboFont and FontLab work too through Live Reload, still in beta but the same loop. Generation is seeded, which means new letters extend the text instead of reshuffling it. You can keep reading the same proof across a whole day of drawing.

Every weight generates from its own inventory. The finished Bold gets full sentences while yesterday’s Hairline gets sparse ones, on adjacent pages of the same document. If a font is too empty for real words, you get nonsense syllables built from whatever letters exist.

A few details came from Jonathan Hoefler’s article on proofing. Every drawn letter is guaranteed to appear at least once, so you never hunt for the q you just finished. The word list carries doubled-letter words like buggy, revved, and vacuum, because spacing problems like to accumulate.

It works in simple text sections, in waterfalls as a display phrase, in columns and rows, where a single cell can generate from its own assigned font, and in compare styles, where every style sets the same words drawn from what the whole family shares. When the generated text lands somewhere you like, the pencil button detaches it into ordinary editable copy.

Hellbox 1.21 is out now. If you’re mid-typeface, the wand is waiting under the content editor.