[0x69420]

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

[bradrn]

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.)

[GuB-42]

The highest speed setting should definitely be called "doctor"!

[dostick]

That’s the coolest thing!And “bounce” slider. What a time to be alive… I wonder if there are more fonts like that with special adjustments. Still waiting for technology to allow handwritten font with true randomness.

[tasuki]

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.com/specimen/Recursive

[merlindru]

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.

[tasuki]

> especially with Casual all the way on

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.

[jxf]

I'm not familiar with Metafont -- is this what you're referencing? https://ctan.org/pkg/metafont?lang=en

[WillAdams]

Yes, that is METAFONT.

You'll find it more accessible via METAPOST, and there have been font designs made using it. Better starting link is:

https://davidcarlisle.github.io/uk-tex-faq/FAQ-mfptutorials....

[svat]

See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf

[delta_p_delta_x]

Not the OP, but probably (please correct me if I'm wrong...) Knuth's claim was that a font's metrics could be described as geometric transformations and equations. I believe most of the TeX typefaces were described with Metafont.

[amelius]

Wait, does more informality mean that individual glyphs for the same character can be different even within the same sentence?

[WillAdams]

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

[tasuki]

Whoa, opulent!

[WillAdams]

Thanks!

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.