83 pointsby california-og7 hours ago11 comments
  • Aardwolfan hour ago
    > https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?page=LKBGE51F3...

    Wow this is awesome, they had box-drawing characters in 1785!

  • efitz6 hours ago
    You should look at some Arabic calligraphy- there is a lot of artistic Arabic calligraphy where passages from the Quran, poetry, and other text are written beautifully as art.
    • efitz6 hours ago
      BTW sorry for my rudeness, I find your project very cool and I love calligraphic type projects. I was so excited that I wanted to share something related to you. :-)
      • california-og5 hours ago
        Heh no worries and thanks! I love Arabic/Islamic calligraphy too, but I've had to leave out all calligraphic forms of text art (calligrammes, micrography, carmina figurata, 17th century european calligraphic art, etc..) out of the archive to keep the scope of the project focused and clear. Otherwise it would take me another 8 years :)

        However, there's some arabic letterpress stuff in the archive! https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?filters=arabic I hope to find more, especially the kufic style, but I haven't found many good sources for that kind of stuff yet.

  • kevinmiller4522 hours ago
    Love this. The 18th century type specimens are gorgeous and it's amazing you pulled them from old digitized books. Do you have plans to add any interactive features like zoom on the images?
    • california-og2 hours ago
      Thank you! If you click on the images, you get a zoomable, full resolution view.
  • softgrow5 hours ago
    At school studying typing there was a class of 66 all manual typewriters except for the two electrics. If you were good and had some spare time, you were given printed instructions to type particular characters and returns. Sometimes shift into red ink. Do it properly and you got an image. So maybe pre ASCII art?
  • una_usta4 hours ago
    This is awesome! A few months ago I got a tattoo of one of the flowers from https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?page=LKBGE51F3...

    I’ve been variously told it looks like the sun, a hedgehog, and a lion & I’m kind fond of all those descriptions

  • frmfrm4 hours ago
    Absolutely incredible, thank you for making this!
  • frmfrm4 hours ago
    Would love to suggest having a way to get the whole archive and metadata to browse locally or mirror, perhaps via a torrent?
  • mujib776 hours ago
    Unique idea looks good
  • phyzix57615 hours ago
    Very cool
  • faddy674 hours ago
    damn amazing
  • 6 hours ago
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