Font and Text Technology

Two disclaimers: First, this article was entirely human generated; no AI was involved in the writing.

The VARC table provides a way for fonts to define composite glyphs made up of other glyphs, where each component glyph can have its own private variation axes.

For the last year or so, Yanone has been working on a very interesting tool called Fontquant.

Recently I had to understand how Android interprets a font’s vertical metrics, and when there will be or will not be clipping in a text box.

Here’s some techniques adapted from an email I sent recently - a project with complicated contextual substitution rules was having problems with GSUB tables overflowing and refusing to compile.

Two years ago, I took over the development of (and later, the technical programme management) of the Noto project, a library of nearly 250 font families spanning over 150 writing systems.

Yesterday I was re-engineering a font to solve some reported issues, and I ended up implementing an OpenType Layout technique which deserves to be better known.

If you’re doing any kind of work with Indic or Brahmic scripts, you’re going to love what I have to say today.

One of the things which really drives me is resourcing underserved languages, particularly in terms of digital inclusion.

OK, here’s the lead - you can do amazing things with COLRv1 fonts: This is a glyph from a variable font, animated with CSS.