Can a font pick randomly between different versions of the same glyph?
I know a font can define unique ligatures for every character combo, but that would still mean the same combos like "fi" always look the same. Nice thing about this low-tech solution is that it can be trivially scaled up to introduce its own ligatures yet pick from them randomly, just at the expense of chore work (making the images).
Of course, at that point, it would be tempting to start looking for a more general solution.
I know a font can define unique ligatures for every character combo, but that would still mean the same combos like "fi" always look the same. Nice thing about this low-tech solution is that it can be trivially scaled up to introduce its own ligatures yet pick from them randomly, just at the expense of chore work (making the images).
Of course, at that point, it would be tempting to start looking for a more general solution.