An Exploration of Variable Fonts (2018) | Hacker News Reader

An Exploration of Variable Fonts (2018)

blog.prototypr.io

40 pointsrememberlenny10 comments

This looks like the poster child of a solution looking for a problem. It's all based on Adobe's development of Multiple Master fonts in the 1990s, and if it hasn't taken off in that amount of time I doubt it ever will.

I don’t think it’s fair to attribute your reasoning here.

The use of web fonts has never been greater. With more websites using non-system fonts, Variable Fonts serves to reduce page weight while providing a technical and design solution.

If a website uses more than two weights from a given font, then a Variable font would save bytes downloaded. The desire to optimize websites is not going away soon, so this will continue to be valuable.

The unnecessary design restrictions around “number of font weights” that many web developers are used to would be blown away by well designed Variable Fonts. Too often web developers are tasked with limiting a designer from using more than two fonts or choosing between a limited number of font weights.

A single font file can replace multiple fonts by utilizing the expanded design space.

Additionally, when considering non-Latin fonts, there a huge implications of using custom fonts. Font weight improvements there are in the megabytes.

Beyond the utility of font size, Variable Fonts present the concept of controlling text within a multi-dimensional design-space, rather than a pre-designated font instance. This caters new opportunities to improve readability on various display sizes.

With the growing number of contexts where people consume text (small and big screens/AR/VR/IOT) the added control provides new creative opportunity and routes for accessibility.

While a variable font does reduce the byte count when using more than 2 weights, the biggest savings come from downloading a single file rather than multiple with all the round-trip delays involved. That could have been accomplished much easier.

The biggest holdup on variable fonts is that they're simply a lot harder to design than regular fonts. The lack of usable examples will hold back the technology more than anything else.

When considering that 80% or even more usage is likely a small set of fonts, you can imagine how the migration of a few fonts can be seen to make a huge impact to the web.

Maybe 'variable fonts' is standard nomenclature in publishing circles but I would have expected something like this to be called 'parametric fonts' or similar.

I'd expect something like "Metafont." :-)

Yeah, it's a bit strange seeing this described as if it's a new thing.

1982: Knuth's paper "The concept of a meta-font" is published.

1991: Adobe's "Multiple Master" fonts are introduced.

1994: Apple's TrueType GX is introduced. (Later "Apple Advanced Typography".)

2016: OpenType "variable fonts".

Maybe "variable fonts" are better than their predecessors? It's hard to tell. But it's strange for the predecessors not to be acknowledged at all.

Much more information about OpenType's "variable fonts" can be found at https://medium.com/variable-fonts/https-medium-com-tiro-intr... -- discussed on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12501665 . (That article does mention TrueType GX and Adobe multiple masters, but not Metafont.)

Did Knuth touch on the ability to morph between different designs of a font, or was it simply the ability to do fonts as sets of curves so that they could be resized?

Edit: never mind, I looked up the original paper and find a good description in just the first paragraph. He definitely had variations of the letters in mind.

Metafont has never found wide adoption, because to be a triple threat of typeface designer, mathematician, and software developer, you basically have to be a tenured stanford professor or their grad student to have enough time to learn everything well enough to make useful type.

And even then, the typefaces made with metafont are often very poor designs compared to those draw in a GUI in a 'dumbfont' format.

Adobe Multiple Master, then TrueType GX, and now OpenType Variations, are a 'best of both worlds' compromise; the drawing quality of visually crafted outlines, and the continuous-space-type-family-in-1-file typographic flexibility of metafont.

In deep typography circles, 'parametric fonts' means typefaces where their attributes are isolated and can be controlled as parameters.

That can be done with OpenType Variable Fonts (eg Decovar and Amstelvar) but is not commonly done with them (eg OTvar fonts with just Weight and Width axes)

Its more common that parametric fonts are made with 'generative font' formats, like metafont and www.Prototypo.io, where there is a turing complete programming language that controls and generates the letter shapes.

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