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by chrisdalke 2159 days ago
Just speculating, but this could help in any web project where you're including multiple font weights/styles -- Currently that involves building a CSS font-family from multiple font files which have a lot of redundant information. With a variable font, your font family could pull from a single font file and use the font parameters to tweak different styles.

The HN audience loves to discuss the bloat in web design -- If you can reduce 500kb of font-<heavy, bold, italic, light> files into a single file that interpolates between font vectors dynamically, that goes a long way to avoiding excessive resources. And you also get the benefit of being able to tweak the parameters of each font style without changing out static files.

For example, with Recursive the entire static font family come in at 12.8mb, while the dynamic font family in a single file is 1.45mb. Obviously you wouldn't load up every variant and Recursive is a very large font, but I could certainly imagine replacing ~8-10 font files with a single variable font.
1 comments
Klathmon 2159 days ago
They offer web optimized versions. The full variable font in woff2 comes in at 523kb, and then there are subsets available from there (reduced character set, reduced customizability), and you can even build your own font with only what is needed.
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seanwilson 2159 days ago
Are variable fonts supposed to have a smaller file size? The examples I've looked at have been bigger than including all the variations you'd expect to use of the non-variable version. Are there examples of a significant file size saving?

Generally with web design, you want to stick to a small number of font weights anyway so if the file size isn't smaller, what's the core motivation?

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rememberlenny 2159 days ago
It depends. The font rendering process is based around "masters" which can vary in count. One font could have one master for all the weights, or multiple masters - for the bold/normal/light. Depending on the master count, the size can differ.

The key thing also is the number of web requests. This is not a trivial detail. One variable font can be less web requests.

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seanwilson 2159 days ago
> The key thing also is the number of web requests. This is not a trivial detail. One variable font can be less web requests.

Is the number of web requests a factor if you're using HTTP/2 though?

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