"Free" two-line font

Alec Jacobson

March 08, 2012

weblog/

Writing SIGGRAPH rebuttals, we're all paranoid about word count (we get 1000 words of ASCII text to refute the reviews). The usual word count tricks are often employed: contraction "do not" to "don't", dropping articles, dropping "el al."s from citations. I've even heard of even riskier tricks like combining "Reviewer #01" into "Rev01". Most of these tricks come at the expense of clarity and professionalism, but it got me thinking about the word count game. The word count algorithm employed by SIGGRAPH's SIS system follows a view rules revealed through their source. The gist is that "non-alphanumerics" get replaced by spaces, then the count of words are just the number of tokens separated by whitespace. In reg-ex form non-alphanumerics are defined here to be:

[^A-Za-z0-9']

Note:The only interesting thing here is that the apostrophe is OK meaning, where as "light-blue" counts as two words "don't" counts as one. Note:There's another slight subtlety that if an apostrophe occurs alone it is OK. This just means " ' " is 0 words and " -'- " is also 0 words. But if non-alphanumerics show up alone, that is, never neighboring an alphanumeric character, then you get 0 words. This leads to a ridiculous "trick" for gaming the word count system by employing a "two-line" font composed entirely of non-alphanumeric words. Here's quick prototype:

/'`  /_\  |\ |   \ / /'\ | |   |_) /_  /_\  |'\
\_. /   \ | \|    |  \_/ |_|   | \ \_ /   \ |_/


''|'' |_| |  ('   [' /'\ |\ | ''|''   )
  |   | | |  _)   |  \_/ | \|   |     .

Note: The obvious danger (besides being embarrassed by actually submitting something written in this font) is that the reviewers may not see it in a correctly line-separated or monospaced, original font. In that case it just looks like garbage.