Simon Marshall
← Projects

Phyrexian Name Writer

A browser tool for composing names in the vertical Phyrexian script from Magic: The Gathering.

Magic The GatheringJavaScriptCanvasSVG

Phyrexian is written vertically, with glyphs hanging off a single continuous stem line, and it maps sounds rather than letters — so you cannot spell an English name in it by swapping letter for letter. Existing transliteration tools either produce nothing or need a font that no longer resolves.

This is a different approach. You supply the glyph shapes yourself, cropped from the published alphabet chart, and the tool does everything else: it traces each crop into vector outlines, finds the stem stroke inside the glyph, straightens it, removes it, and redraws one continuous line at a single weight through the whole name. The result exports as SVG or PNG.

How it works

Each crop is read as a continuous greyscale field rather than a grid of pixels, so the traced edge lands between pixels and comes out smooth at any size. The stem is found by searching every line through the glyph at every slant and taking the one carrying the most ink along its length — the stem spans the full height, marks do not. Because the glyphs are hand-drawn and each leans slightly differently, the tool shears every glyph upright before composing, then scales them all to a common stroke width so the finished line is uniform.

Features

The tool ships empty and contains no glyph artwork — only the machinery to trace and arrange whatever you supply.