The Frankenfont project by Fanthom (Ben Fry and co) is an edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein laid out using characters and glyphs from PDF documents obtained through internet searches.
For each of the 5,483 unique words in the book, the team ran a search (using the Yahoo! Search API) that was filtered to just PDF files. They downloaded the top 10 to 15 hits for each word, producing 64,076 PDF files. Inside these PDFs were 347,565 subsetted fonts. From those fonts, 55,382 unique glyph shapes were used to fill the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text.
The incomplete fonts found in the PDFs were reassembled into the text of Frankenstein based on their frequency of use. The most common characters are employed at the beginning of the book, and the text devolves into less common, more grotesque shapes and forms toward the end.
Profits will be given to Donors Choose to buy books for students.
