I originally submitted this article because I saw the NYT (maybe?) started using them. If you can view this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/28/world/asia/ch..., I had to squint and saw that, "yes! that's a different 'F', and that's a different 'L'". It made so much sense, I thought "surely they didn't hire an artist to handwrite these captions. They must be using some kind of 'variable font'", and I googled just that and this site popped up. :) But then, maybe that's just an artist that works on these sorts of presentations.
Variable Fonts
11–20 of 50 posts
Re: Variable Fonts
#12I think variable fonts are really neat—but I'm curious to know what professional typographers think about them. Take Concourse [1] by Matthew Butterick for example—if you click on the "PDF" link at the top, you'll get a PDF sample of the Concourse font, and on page 7 Butterick talks about how the font has been carefully duplexed so that different weights always take up the same amount of space. With a variable-width…
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If you're actually interested, I recommend watching Helvetica (2007). Some of the interviewees' enthusiasm is really contagious.
I was only able to find it available to watch through certain sites found through Yandex btw.
Re: Variable Fonts
#13I wasted two days recently trying to make a variable font using free software. The only ressource I found is a youtube video telling me to use a python script from a google drive. It didn't work despite many many tries. I have two woffs of the same font that I bought and I wanna make a variable woff2 with only these two variants. I couldn't believe that there isn't a clear way to do this. Here's the youtube video: ht…
there is a well-known piece of free software for this called "metafont" (also the original name for the concept here being neologized "variable font"—a "metafont" is an infinite set of fonts produced by an algorithm from input variables) but it doesn't have a gui and can't import woff or truetype
a variable font is a more generic term than a metafont. it’s a bit pedantic but while both have parameters, a metafont is usually parametrically generated based on its concept of a pen, whereas a variable font usually has different parameters that have been defined by manual bezier drawings. I don’t remember if metafont itself can produce a variable font but people have used metapost to go to SVG and then UFO (font source) from there
Re: Variable Fonts
#14My first exposure to variable fonts was thanks to this article by Lisa Staudinger - https://uxdesign.cc/uniwidth-typefaces-for-interface-design-...
Brilliant article.
Re: Variable Fonts
#15I think variable fonts are really neat—but I'm curious to know what professional typographers think about them. Take Concourse [1] by Matthew Butterick for example—if you click on the "PDF" link at the top, you'll get a PDF sample of the Concourse font, and on page 7 Butterick talks about how the font has been carefully duplexed so that different weights always take up the same amount of space. With a variable-width…
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Many professional typographers exist. Sometimes I am one. Most published type needs to be professionally typeset. The difference between a typical word document and a professional-quality document is far less about the software than it is about the person operating it— there’s a lot of nuance to doing it well. Many folks in the engineering trades tend to see it (and many other types of visual design) as quaint or frivolous, but having really tight typesetting is still very important for many applications. I know because at least half of my clients for that sort of work come to me, exasperated, after struggling to get something from consumer-focused automated tools or premade templates that’s even sorta polished without being totally generic.
There are also type designers who design typefaces. Most people have no reason to like, but check out how many type foundries there are and how much professional fonts cost. Making a good font is incredibly labor intensive.
Re: Variable Fonts
#16I originally submitted this article because I saw the NYT (maybe?) started using them. If you can view this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/28/world/asia/ch... , I had to squint and saw that, "yes! that's a different 'F', and that's a different 'L'". It made so much sense, I thought "surely they didn't hire an artist to handwrite these captions. They must be using some kind of 'variable font'", and I goo…
You mean the handwritten text, “FINISHED SCHOOL” and such?
If so, even if you did that with text, you’d be very unlikely to use variable fonts at all, but rather just draw multiple versions of each character, and choose randomly or based on context (there are a few techniques). That’s waaaaaaaay easier than going variable would be—and variable still wouldn’t be sufficient to achieve the result on its own, though it could be a part of it.
But in this specific case: it’s in an image, the variations look unrealistically authentic for a font, and the framing lines and tiny illustrations and text are all done together. Pretty sure it’s authentic digital hand-drawn art. Won’t take long, genuinely just a few minutes for the actual drawing. The only hard part is fitting fluid-sized text content into the fixed-size illustration frames; that’s why at larger sizes it’ll be oddly spacious in places (and always inconsistently so), and since they’ve only taken care of it down to viewport widths of about 400px, below that (or if you use different fonts, or for a number of other possible causes) you start getting bad collisions.
New York Times decide it’s important to do things like this sometimes, so they get more people involved—not just a writer, but an illustrator and a developer.
Re: Variable Fonts
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
there is a well-known piece of free software for this called "metafont" (also the original name for the concept here being neologized "variable font"—a "metafont" is an infinite set of fonts produced by an algorithm from input variables) but it doesn't have a gui and can't import woff or truetype
a variable font is a more generic term than a metafont. it’s a bit pedantic but while both have parameters, a metafont is usually parametrically generated based on its concept of a pen, whereas a variable font usually has different parameters that have been defined by manual bezier drawings. I don’t remember if metafont itself can produce a variable font but people have used metapost to go to SVG and then UFO (font s…
in metafont (the software) you can define a metafont (a font-valued function) in terms of bézier outlines as well as paths stroked with pens; the relevant metafont commands are 'fill' in the first case and 'draw' (rather than postscript's 'stroke') in the second. it doesn't have an equivalent of postscript's 'eofill'. chapter 13 of the metafontbook describes these commands
i don't know if there's a reasonable way to export any standard vector format from metafont; i think there originally wasn't
Re: Variable Fonts
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Many professional typographers exist. Sometimes I am one. Most published type needs to be professionally typeset. The difference between a typical word document and a professional-quality document is far less about the software than it is about the person operating it— there’s a lot of nuance to doing it well. Many folks in the engineering trades tend to see it (and many other types of visual design) as quaint or fri…
Can't reply to the GP as they are (rightly) flagged, but this engineering mindset that anything which adds elegance or beauty is frivilous really limits the ability of an 'engineer'. Look at the works of the great 19th century engineers like Watt and Brunel, or for more recent examples, the work or Cecil Balmond. There no reason why the elegance of the solution employed in these examples of civil and structural engineering shouldn't translate to software 'engineering'. In fact, take a leaf out of industrial designers book; solve problems as elegantly as possible. Thinking of typographers as 'layout engineers' may help...
Re: Variable Fonts
#19I wasted two days recently trying to make a variable font using free software. The only ressource I found is a youtube video telling me to use a python script from a google drive. It didn't work despite many many tries. I have two woffs of the same font that I bought and I wanna make a variable woff2 with only these two variants. I couldn't believe that there isn't a clear way to do this. Here's the youtube video: ht…
You can use the Python library fontTools, which comes with a command line tool called `fonttools varLib`. Prerequisites: 1. you have a so called Designspace file which tells the tool where in the design space the fonts are and 2. The fonts have compatible glyph outlines and font features.
For the former, get a random font project like https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/cantarell-fonts/-/blob/master..., install the Python tool fontmake in a venv, and run `fontmake -m Cantarell.desigbspace -o ttf-interpolatable`. In a new subdirectory, you'll find a new Designspace file and TTFs. Switch them out and edit the DS file to make sense. Good luck.
For the latter, you are probably out of luck because static fonts are usually compiled in an outline-incompatible way and your only options are to fix them yourself in fontforge or such or ask the original vendor, who is probably going to laugh at you and demand money.
Re: Variable Fonts
#20Some cool typefaces, but "Corona Face Impact" hit hard.