Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997
titleart.dvy.io76 points by davidbarker 3 hours ago
76 points by davidbarker 3 hours 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.)
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.
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).
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.)
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.
Do you have any notes/write-up on that? I'd love to read.
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").
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
Man, this takes me back! The internet felt like a different place back then.
I remember having Word 5 installed on my pc, while the other classmates had Word 97. I was so jealous for their wordart!
This just bought back memories, I used to play with it for hours when I was a kid.
Absolutely love this, like its smooth!
I've always been fond of the red blue gradient one which I imagine to be an Arizona desert.
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