A couple of weeks ago I was messing around and accidentally pasted the output of my Text to ASCII Art Generator into its input box while using the font Future. I was initially very confused because what was in front of me didn’t appear to be the Future font. It appeared to be some larger font, but then I realized it was Future, it was just Future processing Future. I had pasted in the wrong text.

I thought it was a cool effect and poked around to see if any other fonts could process their output in a legible way. Eventually I found the Letter font, which had a neat recursive property to it. Theoretically one could keep cycling the output back as input as create an infinite fractal-like design. I thought this was a neat enough idea to do a short video on (below).

I discuss how it works in the video, as well as link to a few examples in the description. One issue a couple commenters have brought up is how dark the video is. There are unfortunately a couple of things working against me:

• The letters get dimmer the more they’re broken down into sub-characters. This can really be seen in the “Hello” examples where I show the text at different levels. In the 4th level the text starts to almost become invisible.
• For the animation, the brightness of the characters had to be adjusted so they didn’t flash/dim when they went from being rendered as a character to being rendered as a character made of characters. So they could never be rendered at full brightness.

Anyway, check it out if you have a few minutes, and if you like the video be sure to give it a like!