Needs a "monospacicity" slider.
Variable Fonts
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Re: Variable Fonts
#32I 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…
H&FJ's (as it was at the time) Mercury was designed to keep the same spacing in different weights to handle the physical needs of printing a newspaper in different locations and conditions, see the design notes on the typeface [1]. That's the first time I remember this quality being touted in a font (among their set published weights, you couldn't vary it minutely, say, to get a bold-semibold).
While you can try to adjust tracking to make one weight of a face match the spacing of another, the faces are probably individually adjusted to make their own default spacing coherent within the face. It may be different enough between just two faces to sometimes not work, and even less across the entire range.
Adobe Acrobat used a version of Myriad and Minion as under-the-hood variable font substitution to make every PDF readable at least even if you didn't have the original typeface. The promise was you would never see Courier again. Multiple Master fonts made available this idea where you could generate specific typefaces along different axes for your design needs, but it wasn't a live thing, and you ended up with lots of discrete font files. My recollection of Multiple Master was that everyone hated them and were glad to see them die. Maybe the automated adjusting of parameters makes the implementation palatable now.
[1]: https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/design-notes
Re: Variable Fonts
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 engin…
It also really limits the ability of a lot of software. Design, including user interface design, is a communication medium— not even primarily aesthetics. I don’t blame people for not seeing the depth and complexity in fields they’re not in, but as someone that’s worked professionally as a (back-end) developer even longer than i have as a designer, I’m still perplexed by dev culture’s open disdain for design fields. I’ve spent many thousands of hours of my life contributing to FOSS projects, but not as a designer, because most are weirdly hostile to it. The FOSS movement could have so much more impact on the world if we addressed the fact that inscrutable dev-created UIs are unusable to people without a working mental model of software development. The big user-facing FOSS projects like blender and Firefox are foundation or corporation backed with professional designers.
I’m comfortable with layout not being engineering— the processes are quite different. What annoys me is that so many in engineering look down on it because of that.
Re: Variable Fonts
#34I 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…
A modern font-rendering tool would indeed be very useful.
Re: Variable Fonts
#35I'm torn. Variable fonts are neat, but they also lay bare how woefully complicated every single layer of our software stack is where even displaying a single glyph requires interpreting a Turing-complete programming language. As I get older I increasingly just want a more transparent and understandable system that does less, even if that means giving up bells and whistles like automagic font kerning.
I'm a big fan. Variable fonts aren't just neat -- they're a godsend for graphic design when making things like posters, packaging, etc. To get the font weight just right, to get the letter widths just right. When dealing with a font that comes in just 2 weights or even 5, it's so common to want something exactly in between. Or when you want the typeface to be condensed, but the condensed version is way too condensed -- you want "halfway condensed" which is almost never a thing.
And I don't think most variable fonts require any kind of Turing-complete programming language? They're basically just interpolation. And interpolation is not that much added complexity for the rendering engine.
I agree with you that the kind of Turing-complete calculations that fonts these days are able to do, make me feel uneasy as well. But for me, variable fonts don't fall into that category. I look forward to the day when variable fonts are the norm for typefaces that come in different weights and widths.
Re: Variable Fonts
#36Very cool! A filtering interface would be extremely helpful. Currently viewing on mobile.
Re: Variable Fonts
#37Can you subset variable fonts? One way to reduce the size of a font file is the remove all characters not needed (eg non-Latin characters) Is it possible to subset a variable font? Font Squirel is great at subletting non-variable fonts. https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator
Yes, both in theory and in practice [1].
What I'm more curious about is whether variable fonts can save disk space. I.e. whether a variable font that interpolates between "regular" and "bold" is smaller than one font file in "regular" and another in "bold".
Because so much about the two variations is the same -- the same glyphs, the same number of anchor points, in the same order... it's just the actual anchor point coordinates and control point values that differ. I find myself wondering if the actual font file is encoded in a way that eliminates as much redundant information as possible, or if it's basically merely multiple font files concatenated together with extra info on top.
Re: Variable Fonts
#38i prefer calling this concept by its original name, "metafont", in part because "variable font" is sometimes used as lazy shorthand for "variable-pitch font", i.e. proportional rather than fixed-pitch like a typewriter. on the other hand, "metafont" is also the name of a particular piece of free software for this purpose
Yeah, my first thought when I saw the headline was metafont, and also that's so last century. Metafont was first released in 1979. Anyone who has written a document using LaTeX with its default font has used a variable font.
Re: Variable Fonts
#39Can someone explain the difference between multiple master fonts and variable fonts?
I found MM fonts to be super-nice in the nineties. I could emphasize things and keep a very nice visual hierarchy while maintaining very nice stylistic consistency.
I've been confused as to why we can't have them in 2023.
These aren't nearly as pretty as the fonts I used close to three decades ago. Fonts programs are copyrightable (the things which render the bitmap), but font glyphs are not. Even if they were, there are plenty of beautifully-typeset books from hundreds of years ago. Digitizing those should not be hard.
Re: Variable Fonts
#40Can you subset variable fonts? One way to reduce the size of a font file is the remove all characters not needed (eg non-Latin characters) Is it possible to subset a variable font? Font Squirel is great at subletting non-variable fonts. https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator
Yes, both in theory and in practice [1]. What I'm more curious about is whether variable fonts can save disk space. I.e. whether a variable font that interpolates between "regular" and "bold" is smaller than one font file in "regular" and another in "bold". Because so much about the two variations is the same -- the same glyphs, the same number of anchor points, in the same order... it's just the actual anchor point…
Does any online tool exist to automate the creation of a subset variable font?
(Like Font Squirrel from above)