Some cool typefaces, but "Corona Face Impact" hit hard.<p><a href="https://v-fonts.com/fonts/coronafaceimpact" rel="nofollow">https://v-fonts.com/fonts/coronafaceimpact</a>
I 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.<p>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.<p>I couldn't believe that there isn't a clear way to do this.<p>Here's the youtube video: <a href="https://youtu.be/xoQuWARCUWI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/xoQuWARCUWI</a>
Here's Google Fonts filtered for variable only: <a href="https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true" rel="nofollow">https://fonts.google.com/?vfonly=true</a>
I'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 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 font, presumably you'd be able to adjust the tracking as well as the weight to make them match, but maybe not? And maybe not automatically? I dunno.<p>Do any professional typographers have opinions on the pros/cons of variable fonts?<p>[1]: <a href="https://mbtype.com/fonts/concourse/sample.html" rel="nofollow">https://mbtype.com/fonts/concourse/sample.html</a>
Great website but font prices are out of hand! Found one that looks awesome (West) but it's 350EUR if you want all styles! If you want Regular+Medium+Bold, that's still 150EUR. I bought Berkeley Mono back then for $75 and that is like the maximum what I would pay for a font. I am not a commercial user btw.
Wow, what a cool resource. There are some beautiful fonts in here.<p>I dutifully clicked "Load 30 more" 12 times to see them all, but it'd be really helpful to be able to search and filter, and maybe "Load all".
I originally submitted this article because I saw the NYT (maybe?) started using them. If you can view this: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/28/world/asia/china-economy-job-market-young-adults.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/28/world/asia/ch...</a>, 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.
Small discussion in 2018 as a ShowHN [0] (61 points, 13 comments)<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18129474">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18129474</a>
Can you subset variable fonts?<p>One way to reduce the size of a font file is the remove all characters not needed (eg non-Latin characters)<p>Is it possible to subset a variable font?<p>Font Squirel is great at subletting non-variable fonts.<p><a href="https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator" rel="nofollow">https://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator</a>
My first exposure to variable fonts was thanks to this article by Lisa Staudinger - <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/uniwidth-typefaces-for-interface-design-b6e8078dc0f7?gi=2096b94b9540" rel="nofollow">https://uxdesign.cc/uniwidth-typefaces-for-interface-design-...</a><p>Brilliant article.
Can someone explain the difference between multiple master fonts and variable fonts?<p>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.<p>I've been confused as to why we can't have them in 2023.<p>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.
i 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
Fontsource[0] is also an easy way to self-host variable fonts via NPM packages.<p>[0] <a href="https://fontsource.org/?variable=true" rel="nofollow">https://fontsource.org/?variable=true</a>