Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997

(titleart.dvy.io)

174 points | by davidbarker 5 hours ago ago

28 comments

  • davidbarker 4 hours ago ago

    I wanted to make a faithful recreation of the original WordArt so I went through the various screenshots I could find and tweaked the built-in styles by eye. It's pretty fun to play with, and I didn't realise it would take me back to sitting in the ICT computer rooms at my school in the late '90s.

    Enjoy!

    And please feel free to share anything you make with me — I'd love to see. (Contact details in the help menu.)

    • pjmlp 13 minutes ago ago

      Thanks, but if fails short without a dot matrix printer to go alongside it, to print out those hanging banners. :)

    • kleiba2 11 minutes ago ago

      Wow, that landing page was instant nostalgia for me. Well done!

    • poglet 4 hours ago ago

      Brought back many memories. There were also some fonts that added 'shimmer' and 'sparkle' text. You didn't run up a Win98 VM and install the old Word? Great job at making it all by screenshots and eye.

      • davidbarker 4 hours ago ago

        Wonderful.

        I never thought of that, actually. Perhaps I should as I don't remember shimmer or sparkle. I'll see if I can find some examples (if you happen to know of any I can reference please send them over).

        • akx 3 hours ago ago

          Here -- they were effects you could add on regular text:

          https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RHbP2Q7A-Wg

          (I still find it mind-boggling that Word 2000 runs mostly just fine on a MacBook with an entirely different OS and processor architecture via Whisky/Wine.)

  • meerita 9 minutes ago ago

    Who else remembers using BannerMania and printing those endless banners on Epson dot-matrix printers with continuous paper? Man, those were the days! What a nostalgia trip!

  • mixdup 4 hours ago ago

    One of the weirdest bits of 90s tech trivia: Scott Forstall, who was in charge of software at Apple when the iPhone was initially developed, when working as an Intern at Microsoft contributed to the development of WordArt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Forstall#Present

  • matsemann an hour ago ago

    At around 10 years old, I remember spending more time on the word art for my titles than the rest of the paper for school projects, heh.

    Also remember that I set up some kind of templating, where I could print the same document multiple times, but it would go down a list of values. So I could print personalized birthday invitations, I felt so cool 8)

  • swiftcoder 11 minutes ago ago

    I do indeed feel the nostalgia

  • morikyouko 2 hours ago ago

    Is there any plans to support CJK fonts or to release the source code so others can contribute? I'm so disappointed it doesn't support my language! https://www.makewordart.com/ supports a wider character set but is no where near as good otherwise.

    • davidbarker 3 minutes ago ago

      I've added support and it seems to work in the testing I've done. If you find anything that's off, feel free to let me know. Have fun!

  • muglug 4 hours ago ago

    I had some fun adding WordArt support to Slack's Word document renderer.

    Turns out that WordArt is still feasible in modern-day Word, but it's really fiddly.

    • davidbarker 4 hours ago ago

      Do you have any notes/write-up on that? I'd love to read.

      • tim-- 2 hours ago ago

        You need to open up a document in Compatibility Mode on a Windows machine. Basically, open an older .doc file (save a blank new document in Word, as a Word 2000 file). You will see it in the "Insert" tab on the ribbon (it's the "A" next to "text box").

  • jeremycarter 18 minutes ago ago

    I used to use Xara 3D

  • bozdemir an hour ago ago

    I miss 90s CorelDRAW, it reminds me of that. Thanks for the nostalgia fill.

  • halflife 3 hours ago ago

    I remember having Word 5 installed on my pc, while the other classmates had Word 97. I was so jealous for their wordart!

  • symbolhunter 2 hours ago ago

    Man, this takes me back! The internet felt like a different place back then.

  • eis3nheim 3 hours ago ago

    This just bought back memories, I used to play with it for hours when I was a kid.

  • MrFiskarBengt 43 minutes ago ago

    Nobody asked for this!

  • windows2020 4 hours ago ago

    I've always been fond of the red blue gradient one which I imagine to be an Arizona desert.

  • ReplyIntelligen 2 hours ago ago

    haha thats a blast from the past !

  • sairajb2249 2 hours ago ago

    Absolutely love this, like its smooth!

  • hexjy 22 minutes ago ago

    [flagged]

  • naeemnur 2 hours ago ago

    [dead]