41–49 of 49 posts
The font is great. What I miss is a step forward in technology: variable glyphs. The feeling of reading a handwritten text is lost when the letters have always the same shape. If it were possible to add 5-6 little variations for each letter and alternate them randomly, it would be awesome.
[1] https://www.paratype.com/fonts/pt/yefimov-sans?tab=gallery
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Wait, does more informality mean that individual glyphs for the same character can be different even within the same sentence?
Unfortunately not, that would require a random axis, or a contextual swapping based on adjacent letterforms. Prof. Hermann Zapf's eponymous Zapfino has the latter --- I even included an animation of it in my paper on it: http://ftp.tug.org/TUGboat/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately not, that would require a random axis, or a contextual swapping based on adjacent letterforms. Prof. Hermann Zapf's eponymous Zapfino has the latter --- I even included an animation of it in my paper on it: http://ftp.tug.org/TUGboat/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
Whoa, opulent!
It was a fun paper to write, but came a bit too late to have any influence --- at the same conference Jonathan Kew presented XeTeX and shortly thereafter luatex was developed, so it ceased to be necessary to stitch together hundreds of .eps files to make a possibly several GB PostScript file which then had to be distilled to a PDF using the commercial Adobe Acrobat.
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One of my favourite fonts is Recursive[0]. It has even more variable axes than Shantell Sans: apart from the usual weight and slant it also has a "Casual" axis as well as "Monospace" (which is continuous from fully proportional to fully monospace). I use Recursive as my terminal font, and in many other places. You can also play with it on Google Fonts[1]. [0]: https://www.recursive.design/ [1]: https://fonts.google.c…
Recursive is terrifically legible, especially with Casual all the way on. I couldn't tell you why, but reading code feels much, much more natural with it than with most other fonts. Perhaps it's the high degree of separation because every character looks meaningfully different? The "kerning" (or whatever the visual space between letters is called in monospace fonts) is also among the best.
Ah, thanks for that. I wasn't brave enough! I was using the Duotone version (normal version is Linear, while italics and bold are Casual). Indeed I'm happier with everything being Casual.
the formality slider (play with it at the google fonts page linked in the article[0]) is genuinely one of the coolest uses of a variable font axis i've seen in recent memory. it feels like we're witnessing the slow and steady vindication of metafont. [0] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Shantell+Sans
Typotheque’s Dash has a very similar variable axis, though they call it ‘Speed’: https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/dash-casual . (For some reason you need to click on the ‘Variable’ box in order to see the full variable range.)