hckrnws

Thanks for sharing! I always love looking at the hand-painted advertisements when I'm back in India. I almost never see it in the cities these days (billboards have taken over), but back in my parents' villages, a lot of older painted advertisements (like Maha Cement) are still there on the walls that run past the main street.

On a side note, I have an HTTP200 license plate and I want to get some nice Indian truck style lettering saying HORN <HTTP200> PLEASE around it :)

a project that has been on my todo list for years is to crowd source the dividing line between "horn ok please" and "sound ok horn" (I saw the latter for the first time when I lived in Bangalore, but I gathered it was the common version in the south, which implies the existence of a border marking the transition)

HAHA. This joke made my day.

What the heck does "HORN OK PLEASE" mean anyway? I had seen it my whole childhood.

"horn please", to tell people to honk while passing.

OK was originally a separate thing that used to occur in locations other than between the two words. I distinctly recall this from my childhood. Don't know the origins of it but there is some suggestion on the internet that it was copied from Tata trucks which had the logo of the OK soap (a lotus).

They could occur in the current order, but it was not necessary. It should still be read as separate from the "horn please" phrase.

As the country became functionally more illiterate over the years (yes, probably a controversial opinion :) ), the three words were just rote copied inline and painted on trucks, with the meaning lost to time.

> What the heck does "HORN OK PLEASE" mean anyway? I had seen it my whole childhood.

I was told that this was the polite honk triplet - the two honk call and one honk response.

"honk honk" / "honk"

"horn ok" / "please"

As a type nerd, wowza; this is why I come to HN. I'd never even think to look for this. Thanks for the share.

Love the over the top Amrit D.J. Band ones; they remind me of old school Barnum & Bailey signs.

I've always observed a curious thing within India regarding the Devnagari (Hindi) and Latin (English) scripts. Essentially all English words are always written in Devnagari, but it's rarely the other way around. For example it is much more likely to see इंग्लिश टू हिंदी than "angrezi se hindi".

My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.

> My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.

This is not very close to true. English (even a given accent) has a rather high number of phonemes, and they don’t overlap very closely with Hindi. What is probably more relevant here is that Devanagari is relatively phonetic so writing in it is useful to describe English pronunciations, more so than the English script is for Hindi (or English, for most unfamiliar words).

A very incomplete list of languages by approximate number of phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

I'm not sure if I don't understand, or completely disagree, but if you look anywhere 'digital' like Reddit for example, a lot of Hindi is written in Latin script. WhatsApp too in private communication, where people don't have or haven't understood how to use a devanagari (or transliterating) keyboard on their phone.

As a Britisher learner it's frustrating¹ actually, because there is a standard for how to do this - IAST, for Sanskrit/derived generally - but of course that's not what native speakers use casually. E.g. your 'angrezi se hindi' would be 'añgrezī se hiñdī' but anyone writing Hindi with those accents is foreign or an academic. (Also people will casually write 'ay' instead of 'e' ए or 'ee' for 'ī' ई, etc. cf. 'paneer'.)

[1: The frustration is because it leads to ambiguity, whereas IAST is 1:1 and so preserves the phonetic nature of devanāgarī, and tells me exactly which t/d/r sound, if it's aspirated, etc. which a fluent native layperson's anglicised interpretation really doesn't. They might write gora & gora and know from context if that's gora or ghoṛā, but if I don't already know the word a gora like me is stuck.]

I am a noob, but is the Zohran Mamdani (new NYC mayor candidate)'s campaign also using this style of typeface for the logos etc. It looks similar.

From a search it seems it was largely born from NYC bodega signage (which is ~every culture on the planet; my bodegas over the years have been Pakistani, Senegalese, Ghanaian, Haitian, Mexican...) but some Bollywood posters' influence (one article says he asked for it specifically, others that that's just an inspiration). So, yes.

Tangential novel recommendation: A House for Mr Biswas (V.S. Naipaul)

This is v cool! thanks for sharing

Related, there are many painters, who work as employees at truck repair or denting painting shops, and write generic words like TANK on Diesel Tank, or like OK BYE TATA on rear bumper, or simply names, with dome petals around them. They start with a yellow rectangle, and then paint black lines as negative space, eventually bringing out yellow letters out.

[dead]

Can someone now Vibe-code a web font-generation tool that converts these typographic gems into full embeddable web-fonts?

Fontself Maker for Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop or Glyphr Studio can convert vector drawings of these sign paintings into usable web fonts, though capturing their hand-painted nuances remains challenging.