This project started because I simply couldn’t find the thing I wanted: A good SCP-like-generator-with-built-in-redactions that looked like it was actually typed on paper. However, as I started working on it, I soon came to realize that this was hard to find for a reason.

A puddle as deep as an ocean

If you never went down the rabbit hole of how you get from the char primitive of 8-bit binary to these words on the screen (shut up about utf-8, I know, it’s more than 1 byte, kinda), you will soon realize that it is way more complicated than you think. This modified xkcd comic from the HarfBuzz github page should at least give you some idea of the strange complexity we are dealing with here, and HarfBuzz isn’t even the whole of it, that’s just for text shaping. That doesn’t even cover:

• Rasterizing
• Word-Wrapping
• UTF-8
• Fonts
• Locales
• Inevitable hopelessness

So, needless to say, I had a lot more work cut out for me than I thought. Hopefully I can go more in depth with all of that, but right now, I am putting this on the backburner. I will make it avalible to anyone who wants to look at my awful code.

Config file

I did add a config file to make the setup somewhat easier, but just keep in mind that you will have to download/specify your own fonts and page textures, since I didn’t want to put those on my repo.

page_width = 2048
page_height = 2048
margin_top = 100
margin_bottom = 200
margin_left = 100
margin_right = 100
letter_spacing = 20.0
line_spacing = 20.0
default_font = “fonts/Special_Elite/SpecialElite-Regular.ttf”
heading_font = “fonts/Pica/Pica.ttf”
stamp_font = “fonts/stampwriter_kit/STAMPWRITER-KIT.ttf”
font_size = 32.0
heading_size = 64.0
stamp_size = 72.0
jitter_px = 2.0
blur_sigma = 0.3
ink_opacity = 0.95
redaction_marker = “==”
stamp_marker = “!!”
paper_albedo = “paper/CC0-Texture-Paper01/PaperAlbedo.png”
paper_normal = “paper/CC0-Texture-Paper01/PaperNormal.png”
paper_roughness = “paper/CC0-Texture-Paper01/PaperRough.png”