Font Technology — TypeDrawers

Primework

kunstx — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:41:28 +0000

We are open-sourcing Primework.

The web doesn't need another HTML replacement.

It needs better tools for the problems HTML and CSS weren't designed to solve.

Primework is a precision rendering framework that complements the web platform. Use browser primitives where they already work well, and use Primework where deterministic rendering, advanced typography, precision layout, and custom rendering become part of the product.

It can be used:

- Standalone
- Embedded in existing applications
- As an overlay where only part of the UI needs precision rendering

No rewrites. Adopt it only where it adds value.

Primework is also an experiment in rethinking rendering on the web. I hope some of the ideas explored here can help inspire future browser engine improvements—so these kinds of workarounds become unnecessary over time.

This is just the beginning, and we would love your feedback.

Check out the project, share your thoughts, and contribute if you're interested.

https://kunstx.online/primework

Negative slnt values as per VF spec

Thierry Blancpain — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:46:49 +0000

The VF spec describes the slnt values to be negative numbers equivalent to the slant degree*. So a font of ours might receive a -6 slnt value for the obliques. In my view this is insane and in no way reflective of user behavior. Positive values are much more representative of user expectation.

I can’t think of a negative impact beyond it doesn’t match the spec of going with positive numbers. Are there any known software bugs from doing so?

* "Values can be interpreted as the angle, in counter-clockwise degrees, of oblique slant from whatever the designer considers to be upright for that font design."

About line spacing

mauro sacchetto — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:43:20 +0000

I did an experiment to adapt a Simoncini font; I'm currently working on Debian Linux with FontForge. But I'm pretty confused.

I've run into a problem with line spacing:

In the texts I type with LibreOffice, if I set the metrics as shown in the image, the lines are extremely narrow, to the point that the capital accents intersect with the descent glyphs. You can see this in the attached image. However, everything works with other fonts, even though they have completely different settings: Adobe Text Pro sets Typo Line Gap: 200 and Line Spacing: 200, while EB Garamond sets Typo Line Gap: 0 and Line Spacing: 0:

With LibreOffice, the lines are properly spaced only if I set the Typo Line Gap value to very high values (at least 300). If I use the same font with LaTeX with the above settings (and not big Typo Line Gap, but set to 0), however, there's no problem.

Is this problem due to some intrinsic feature of the font, or could it be caused by other incorrect or missing data? Let me know if any other information might be helpful.

Thanks

FontFridge: an enhanced Google Fonts filter

chingru — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:54:06 +0000

▌　https://font.chingru.com　▐

Google Fonts is a great place to dig for treasure, but its filtering is far too weak. Right now I can only filter for Variable Font, but sometimes I want to be more specific about whether it's the weight (wght), width (wdth), or optical size (opsz) axis.

My projects also occasionally depend on particular OpenType features, and I need to find which families offer stylistic sets (ss##) or historical ligatures (hlig). This comes up especially in font engineering, when I am curious how a certain feature was implemented and open source projects turn out to be the best teaching material. Google Fonts' filtering tools just are not there yet, so I built FontFridge.

I think of FontFridge as an enhanced Google Fonts filter. OpenType features, variable font axes, writing systems, languages, and on through UPM, hinting, color font format, x-height, cap-height ratio and more, all filterable.

Each font family page gives you live previews of every named instance, editable specimen text, a glyph browser organized by Unicode block, metrics data, designer bios, license, and ready-to-use embed code for Google Fonts, Bunny Fonts and Fontsource.

This site is only a directory and a filter. Every family stays under its original license. My thanks to all the open source designers and developers behind them.

The site itself is MIT license with source at https://github.com/rutopio/font-fridge

Reports of any data or tagging errors are welcome, as are suggestions for new filter criteria, or any other feedback and ideas!

NeuralType: A Post-OpenType Font Format

Eli Heuer — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:23:30 +0000

I'm working on a post-OpenType font format where font files are small neural networks, not confined to the little boxes inherited from metal typesetting, and I already have a working demo!

You can copy, paste, delete, type, move the cursor around, and drag a kashida axis with a slider. It's all open source and built with the simplest possible neural network.

Play with the demo and find the source code on my blog: https://elih.net/blog/neuraltype/

https://youtu.be/5ljwBFLXms4

Explaining myself and Mixfont, an AI font generation model

ericlu — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:56:21 +0000

I received some negative comments in a recent thread where I asked for critique on a font I created with the help of AI. The font itself is actually quite liked on Reddit (over 400+ upvotes in r/typography) but the Typedrawers thread began to include some personal attacks on me and the work I did on it. I wanted to start a new discussion (in accordance with the forum rules) to explain myself, the situation, and share more about the research I have done on Mixfont, which is a frontier AI model for generating fonts.

First let me state that I post here humbly and respectfully with full intention of learning from the experts here. I was told by professional typographers that this would be a positive community where I could ask for feedback.

Much of the negativity directed towards me stems from an old post I made on X. I'm not proud of the way I phrased that, and it was never my intention to help or allow people steal from type designers. The original intent behind the post was more about my frustration with large companies like Monotype, which in my opinion have taken a monopoly over typography, and started to charge insane prices with very litigious approaches, and in the process also have not paid the actual type designers. In retrospect, the post wasn't nuanced enough and I regret making it, but I've since left it up for transparency sake.

My hope is that some can see past the negativity and realize the potential behind the technology to help creatives and assist with the typographic process. Unfortunately, I don't control what goes viral, and if you read my other posts, you'll see there are tons of launches and screen-recordings that I share of legitimately useful workflows that never get any engagement.

Mixfont is my latest research project. It is a state-of-the-art AI font generator that can create TTFs from a text prompt or an image. Also, I'm not some billionaire AI CEO. I am a solo developer, and this project is completely bootstrapped and created by myself with no outside funding. I worked on this completely out of my own passion for typography and wanting to build technology that could help designers.

Stealing fonts and harming designers was never the intent of the software. One of the initial reasons I created this model was because creating fonts was such a tedious process. I wanted to create a simple font out of my handwriting, and I had to meticulously draw out each character. Once I finished the letters, I realized there were symbols, numbers, and hundreds more accented letters that I had to also complete to get a complete font.

I believe there are many positive benefits that this model can provide for designers. One obvious application is to take an existing font, and extend the support of its glyphset to more Latin languages, especially minority languages with obscure letters like in Welsh, Basque, or Icelandic. This extension workflow can fit right into existing software like Glyphs:

Another interesting application that the model is capable of is helping to explore new directions quickly. Instead of having to draw glyphs from scratch, the model can go directly from images to a complete set of letters. They are never perfect in one shot, but the ability to more quickly generate variations or explorations is important. In addition, the generated letterforms can be used as a starting point to start a manual tracing process or just to save time. Example of a generation from my own handwriting:

A final use case I wanted to share would be to generate variations of full fonts. Recently I used the model to generate an italic version of an existing typeface (example below). This way an underlying type design could be quickly extended with less tedious work from a designer. This technology can also be extended to generate light or bold variations as well.

I think that this technology can be very useful and helpful when employed in the right way. I don't believe any of the workflows I shared above are "ghastly" or "anti-human" as I was accused of in the other thread. I also think it can fit well into existing workflows and I see little difference between this and auto-tracing or auto-kerning algorithms that already exist today - these programs are created to speed up the workflow of type designers and enhance their work. Ultimately I believe that this can help creators more than it can hurt, because the human aspect of typography will always exist.

Finally I should address the training of the model. There were open source fonts (Google Fonts) that were used in the training but only to organize the format and spacing of the fonts. However, The vast majority of the training was not done on fonts at all. None of the copyrighted fonts from designers in this forum were used. Instead, it was trained entirely on raster images from across the internet - images of text and letters in things like signs, posters, screenshots, and more. That's how the model is able to output things like this for "a font that looks like dinosaurs":
This font isn't copied nor was it trained on an existing "dinosaur font". The model itself is simply aware of the notion of what dinosaurs look like, and based on many images from across the internet, what letters look like, and combining the two together.

I don't believe that this tech will replace creatives. The outputs are not at the level of a human designer, and I don't even personally believe that they ever will. Instead, it should be used as a helpful tool and accelerator.

I hope to have a positive discussion about this tool and its applications. I have spoken with many typographers individually and even some who have literally cried with happiness about how this can help finish old projects or get rid of the tedious aspects of the work. I would love your feedback and I will make myself available for a conversation with anyone who would like to talk. DM me or respond to this post and I will be more than happy to set up a meeting to learn more about your fears, concerns, or just comments. I personally am becoming depressed from the hate, negativity, and personal attacks directed towards this project and I hope to address this and move forward.

Shield Font - anti ai web text scraping via opentype ligatures

Dave Crossland — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:56:17 +0000

shieldfont.org/white-paper looks similar to the recent decoy font and older tempest and font enigma

Apple's ancient Macintosh Font Editor app

Mark Simonson — Mon, 20 May 2024 23:58:49 +0000

I've been down a rabbit hole lately digging into an early Macintosh development tool called "Font Editor." This was the tool that (I assume) Susan Kare and Bill Atkinson used to create the iconic bitmap fonts that came with the original Macintosh. I also have heard that it was the app that Zuzanna Licko used to create the earliest Emigé fonts.

I sent for Apple's "Software Supplement" ($100 + tax) in late 1984. I received a pile of disks containing developer tools, including Font Editor, which I used in late 1984 to early 1985 to make some bitmapped fonts. I developed these further using Fontastic when it was released in spring 1985 by Altsys. (If you're wondering, I never ended up doing anything with the twenty or so fonts I made, although I did used to offer them for free on my website in the early days of my site. One of them, Condensed Gothic, wound up being licensed by the Pebble watch people. When Altsys released Fontographer, I lost interest in making bitmap fonts.)

Anyway, I've been trying to reconstruct my methods for using Font Editor because I honestly have forgotten most of how it worked. It's an incredibly primitive and fragile tool meant for internal use at Apple and by its developers. It would be replaced by ResEdit, but ResEdit was more of a general purpose tool and less capable as a font editor in my opinion, in spite of being more polished.

If you have a Macintosh 128K or 512K, or a 128K emulator (it won't run on anything else, AFAIK), you can find disk images for it here. (The one you want is "MacStuff 2 2/85", which is a bootable disk containing Font Editor.)

Through trial and error, I've managed to figure out mostly how it works and how to use it (probably going through the same process as I did in 1984—I recall there was no documentation, or very little). Ultimately, I'm going to put together a how-to guide and (I hope) post a video about it on YouTube. Not that anyone would likely want to use this app now, but to show how things were done in the early days of digital fonts.

I was wondering if anyone else here remembers or used this app, or perhaps has any documentation for it.

(Below is a screenshot showing it running in Mini vMac with one of the fonts I made with it.)

What is the new default Devanagari font in iPhone and other Apple devices since iOS 26?

kedar — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:10:49 +0000

Apple quietly changed the default Devanagari (and possibly other Indic languages) with the launch of iOS 26 and Mac OS 26 last year. But nowhere is the change documented.

Pre-26 font (Kohinoor):

Since-26 font:

Hinting, is anyone still using it?

Mike Duggan — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:16:52 +0000

Just curious to know, if anyone is still using hinting, or probably autohinting still? I did notice a post about some new tools for autohinting Variable fonts, but wondering have we reached the point yet that its just not needed anymore

Can you tell the difference between AI-generated vs human-made fonts?

ericlu — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:59:41 +0000

Hi Typedrawers,

In the replies to some of my previous posts about Mixfont, there were folks that were dismissive of the quality of AI-generated fonts. A lot of people dismissed the quality of the one example font I posted (Gothic Gumdrop) and I've also seen some articles shared discussing how high quality AI-generated fonts are still 3-4 years away.

I wanted to challenge these claims as I personally believe that the raster->vector font generation pipeline that's being used in Mixfont today is already good enough for the vast majority of use cases for decorative, display, stylized, etc fonts. While I think that creating a legendary variable font is not quite possible, I do feel that for most projects using AI-generated fonts is already high quality enough for many designers.

To prove out this hypothesis I've put together an AI Font Quiz, where some of these fonts are licensed from real font foundries, while others in this quiz are 100% generated with AI using the Mixfont model. You can try typing and testing out all of the fonts, and when you're ready you can select whether you think the font is AI-generated or human-made.

Obviously if you download the TTF and inspect it you'll be able to easily tell the source of the font, but the point of the quiz is to see if you can visually decide whether something is AI-generated or human-made.

I would love for you all to try out taking the quiz and let me know your scores. My thinking is that if this is hard even for professional type designers than it will be a challenge for everyday folks who don't think as much about type. I want to challenge the assumption that font generation is years away because I really think it is here right now and can be used and applied in many new ways.

Respectfully looking forward to your feedback,
Eric

An article on Bitmap fonts

mitradranirban — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:02:56 +0000

Just read this article on bitmap fonts by David Jones.
https://home.octetfont.com/blog/2026-07-02/bitmap-fonts.html

State of the art in AI font generation — Simon Cozens

Thomas Phinney — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 17:07:05 +0000

I am super impressed with this article from Simon Cozens explaining where AI font generation is currently at, with tons of references.

Yes, this is aside from whether any of this is a good idea, ethical, or the copyright and design patent situation for “AI-generated” fonts. Those are all totally reasonable discussions to have, which we are having elsewhere. But I think it is also useful to understand what has already happened, and what is likely to happen.

Some highlights:

The China/Japan vs rest-of-world differences are fascinating — both how far things are along for ideographs, and how much of a gap there still is on the alphabetic side.
What even is AI font generation is a question. Does one mean generating a complete font from a text description, or from an initial sample, or what?
What are the different AI technologies being used, and their strengths and weaknesses? Which ones seem to be dead ends or impractical, and why?
There is often a critical gap being able to generate images of font glyphs, vs vector font glyphs.

Convention on descriptive names for color fonts with separate tables

Michael Rafailyk — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 10:01:05 +0000

It seems that the color fonts battle is leaning towards COLR table eventually becoming the standard, at least on the web. However, Adobe still only supports OpenType-SVG table, which complicates production. One of the options is to include both tables (COLR and OT-SVG) in one font file, but practice has shown that in some applications and web browsers this leads to the fact that the font does not display because the wrong table is used. Therefore, the safest option for now is to provide two separate versions of the color font with different tables.

The difficulty of such a separation is that you need to explain to the user as early as possible (before purchasing) which version he needs – to avoid a situation where the user has purchased the color font style with a wrong table and it does not display in a particular application or web browser. For a casual user who is new to this, it is pretty darn difficult, and when it comes to licensing, it becomes even more confusing:
Adobe: Desktop license / OTF/TTF format / SVG table.
Affinity: Desktop license / OTF/TTF format / COLR table.
Website: Webfont license / WOFF/WOFF2 format / COLR table.

The first thing we can do is to give descriptive style names, second – provide instructions. And it would be nice to have some naming conventions. Here are a few options that come to mind.

1. Specifying a table after a style name:

Family Style COLR
Family Style SVG

2. Specifying that it is an OpenType-SVG and not an old SVG table:

Family Style COLR
Family Style OTSVG

3. Noting of which one is needed for Adobe apps:

Family Style (...?)
Family Style Adobe

Maybe you have a better practice?

State of the art in AI image generation as we go into 2026.

Ray Larabie — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 04:47:31 +0000

Yesterday, OpenAI released a new image generator, likely to compete with NanoBanana. Here's where we're at:

The prompt: Make a typeface specimen graphic showing the alphabet. The font is a techno typeface with capitals and lowercase.

I think the font bears some resemblance to Conthrax. The next prompt: Make a typeface specimen graphic showing the alphabet. It's the same as the previous typeface but an extra-light version.

Make a typeface specimen graphic showing the alphabet. It's the same as the typeface in the last two images but an ultra-bold version.

Make a typeface specimen graphic showing the Cyrillic alphabet. It's the same as the typeface in the last three images but the "regular" weight version.

Make a typeface specimen graphic showing a full set of currency symbols. It includes never symbols such as the riyal currency symbol. It's the same as the typeface in the last four images but the "regular" weight version.

Well, it didn't handle that last one so well, did it? It can render some well-known fonts like Clarendon, Montserrat, and Franklin Gothic fairly accurately.

Make a typeface specimen graphic showing the alphabet in uppercase and lowercase. The background is white, and the characters are black. The font is Franklin Gothic Bold.

I'm not thrilled about this, but I like to check in on new image generators to assess the threat. Anyway, I thought this might be interesting for anyone who hasn't been keeping up. If you want to experiment, it's just a regular ChatGPT prompt, and I think it'll work in the free version.

what font is this?

musogco — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:18:56 +0000

A new Wakamai Fondue

Roel Nieskens — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 08:21:36 +0000

Hi everybody, a new version of Wakamai Fondue was just released at the Fontstand conference in Berlin:

https://wakamaifondue.com

It's now using LibFont instead of Fontkit which allows me to dig a little bit deeper into the lookups and other font tech. There are a few more interfaces to test your font, with one generic word processor-style tester and a few dedicated to specific font tech. Some UI updates should also make it more convenient to test your font in the browser.

A bit more background info can be found in https://pixelambacht.nl/2026/a-new-wakamai-fondue/ and a more detail guide will follow soon.

Wakamai Fondue also features a test font (a role played by DJR's Gimlet while this version was in beta), namely Polymode Sans by XYZ Type Foundry. This way you can take Wakamai Fondue for a spin by just clicking a button.

You can also run it locally by grabbing the code from https://github.com/Wakamai-Fondue/wakamai-fondue-site/ which can be useful if you want to tweak the UI or the underlying engine to your liking. As before, there are no cookies or tracking and "uploaded" fonts never leave your computer.

The site doesn't yet work on mobile, and there's going to be a few rough edges, but I hope it'll be useful when testing your fonts.

Thanks to @Dave Crossland for funding the initiative to develop the new version!

There are a few other neat features in the making which'll hopefully put even more "ooh!" in the fondue. I'm currently working as independent freelance for all things fonts-and-frontend, so you can always commission me to add features or help you set up a local copy or workflow.

Happy fonduing! 🫕

Handling Fontspector's "codepoints not covered by METADATA subsets"

Daniel Yacob — Tue, 19 May 2026 10:53:19 +0000

Greetings All,

Writing to ask for assistance in tackling this error that appears in Fontspector reports. The message seems straightforward, but when I make the indicated correction, it makes no impact. For example:

The following codepoints supported by the font are not covered by any subsets defined in the font's metadata file, and will never be served. You can solve this by either manually adding additional subset declarations to METADATA.pb, or by editing the glyphset definitions.

U+02D8 BREVE: try adding one of: yi, canadian-aboriginal

Then, adding the following to the METADATA.pb, and retesting:

subsets: "yi"

the same errors appear, it's like the METADATA.pb is not being read. I'd appreciate any suggestions here.

The alternative correction was to edit the glyphset definition, which I believe is referring to the resources here: https://github.com/googlefonts/glyphsets . I don't know how that would work though, unless I could have local copies that fontspector would read.

thanks!

-Daniel

30th anniversary of OpenType (May 6)

Ray Larabie — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:48:11 +0000

For the 20th anniversary, I joked that maybe by the 25th anniversary, basic OpenType features would finally work consistently in PowerPoint.

For the 25th anniversary, I joked that maybe by the 30th anniversary, PowerPoint would finally support basic OpenType features properly.

Well, here we are at 30.

As far as I can tell, PowerPoint still treats advanced typography like a suspicious new experimental technology from the future. Kerning classes remain unreliable; stylistic sets, alternates and other standard OpenType features are still mostly absent from the UI or inconsistently supported.

At this rate, I’m optimistic that by the 35th anniversary, presentation software may finally discover typography from the age of Tamagotchis.

Glare of white 100% backgrounds and how it affects fonts

jaimes — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:32:12 +0000

I noticed recently that the people at Tiro Typeworks use a very muted background (#e3e5e1) in their editable font samples.

And experimenting in my own website with muted off-white backgrounds, I noticed with surprise that the letters appeared darker with the muted background instead of 100% white.
I'm using #efede2 now in my sites and in my programming text editor, and I think they're much more readable.

I notice especially with serif fonts. For serif fonts, with muted background, the letterforms appear "fuller" if it makes sens. Sometimes the stems get a bit washed out over 100% white background.

I realize that this is probably highly machine dependent, and person dependent, but, I don't think it should be surprising, in retrospect:
I checked the Spiekermann book (3rd ed) and there's a page about font adjustments to compensate for light text on dark background, and especially when the light text is actually illuminated from behind.
And this is exactly the converse of computer screens, no?

Do other people notice this? Are there recommendations for screens? (I have found some web designer sites calling for off-white, but nothing formal). And, is there a technical name for this?

A browser extension to avoid glare on text

jaimes — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:12:05 +0000

Hi,

a while ago I had a discussion here about pure white background on screen producing glare for reading. See https://typedrawers.com/discussion/5494/glare-of-white-100-backgrounds-and-how-it-affects-fonts

I've created a browser extension that works on Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, and substitutes text backgrounds that are too bright with something more muted.

Here: https://glareless.silvela.org/

I hope it's useful to some, and I'd love to hear any feedback, positive or negative.

Hinting Variable Fonts

rui_abreu — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 14:15:46 +0000

Hello Everyone,

Is there a way to autohint variable fonts, either CFF or True Type?
From what I can understand ttfautohint is not hinting TT variable fonts, but what about CFF variable fonts is it possible to autohint them?

Many Thanks!

W3C Incremental Font Transfer (IFT) is now a candidate recommendation

Dave Crossland — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 18:23:58 +0000

Big news for web fonts (especially CJK)

https://www.w3.org/news/2025/w3c-invites-implementations-of-incremental-font-transfer/

Variable Fonts: Interview Requests

Doug Wilson — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:49:00 +0000

Hello type designers! We are now 10 years into the official launch of Variable Font technology.

How do you actually use or create variable fonts in your work? Do you make them? Have clients requested VFs from you? Do you think VFs are a total bust? Do you think VFs are the future and everyone should be making them?

I’m doing three weeks of interviews in April to gather real-world feedback on the state of variable fonts and the future of the technology. I’m looking for type designers for 30-minute conversations about your experience with variable font production, adoption, and where you think the technology is headed.

Full disclosure: this is part of a paid research project with Font Bureau (David Berlow, not Monotype), but no one has control over the outcomes. I want the full range of perspectives—if you’re skeptical or critical of where VFs are going, I especially want to hear from you.

Results may be published with credit and attribution (unless you prefer to remain anonymous). I can’t pay you for your time, but you’ll have my everlasting thanks.

I have limited slots, so please share this around and book a time here: https://typeadvisor.com/vf-interviews.html

PowerPoint: Please vote for better variable font support

Olli Meier — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:04:32 +0000

I have created a public feedback about PowerPoint issues with variable fonts, if someone has a Microsoft account and would be willing to vote for it: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/9b6b92b6-802e-f111-9730-7c1e52f15e53

The thing is, I recently figured out something promising: PowerPoint uses a different rendering engine for variable fonts. You may wonder why this promising? It's because the render which is used for variable fonts, supports opentype features eg. GPOS kerning and calt. I have made a video about it for a hack for static fonts (please keep in mind that this is a hack not recommendation): https://youtube.com/shorts/TlOKT7uk__k
PPT nay or may not change their strategy to support GPOS kerning for static fonts, but as it works with variable fonts, it's an argument to switch to variable fonts, especially as it also supports other features like calt.

My hope is, that if the developers from Microsoft are willing to improve how variable fonts are supported within PowerPoint we finally may have a chance for better typography within PPT.

A GSUB Syntax, and Capability, Question

Daniel Yacob — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:30:03 +0000

Greetings All,

Before giving up on this, I thought to check here to learn if there is any way to express substitution logic in a way similar to:

sub A [one two three] by [X Y Z] ;

where the substitution output would be as per:

A 1 => X
A 2 => Y
A 3 => Z

As expressed above, the syntax isn't valid. Is there a similar expression that accomplish the intended substitution?

thanks!

PowerPoint: Please vote for OpenType Feature support eg. Kerning

Olli Meier — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 14:42:52 +0000

Hi Folks,

I am sick of PowerPoints ignorance related to OpenType feature eg. Kerning. If you do the same, I am more than thankful when you're willing to help and vote for OpenType feature support within PowerPoint:
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/2ab71476-dca0-ed11-a81b-002248519701

And please feel free to share this

Thanks a lot in advance,
Olli

Pretext - “Pure JavaScript/TypeScript library for multiline text measurement & layout”

Adam Ladd — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:49:54 +0000

https://github.com/chenglou/pretext#

Anyone see this recently announced? Info and links to Demo site above. A quick summary:

Beyond the 4-style mode

Ray Larabie — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:13:31 +0000

I’m in the middle of modernizing a few families and would love to hear how others are handling this.

For years I’ve stuck to the classic 4-style model (Regular / Italic / Bold / Bold Italic) at the legacy family level, but I’m now moving toward larger families (adding weights like SemiBold, etc.) using typographic family naming (nameID 16/17). From what I can tell, this is the modern approach and works well in Adobe apps and current environments…but it does technically violate the old “max 4 fonts per family name (nameID 1)” rule, which some checks (e.g. FontBakery) still flag. So, I’m curious:

Are you comfortable exceeding the 4-style limit in production families?

Do you rely fully on nameID 16/17 now, or still structure around legacy constraints?

What are you using to validate family naming and style linking these days? (TransType and FontBakery reports it as an error.)

Have you run into any issues with Monotype, Adobe, or other distributors when doing this?

I still have customers using older applications, so I’m trying to balance modern structure with graceful fallback. Would really appreciate hearing how others are handling this in practice.

Monotonic Greek in double encoded unicase fonts

Michael Rafailyk — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:04:35 +0000

Question 1 — quadruple encoding

Since the letter shape of Alpha and Alphatonos looks identical in Monotonic Greek (and it is true for double encoded unicase fonts), I would like to encode all ~tonos versions to their base letters. Is it a good idea? If so, is my encoding map correct?

Alpha			0391 03B1 0386 03AC	← Alphatonos
Beta			0392 03B2
Gamma			0393 03B3
Delta			0394 03B4
Epsilon			0395 03B5 0388 03AD	← Epsilontonos
Zeta			0396 03B6
Eta			0397 03B7 0389 03AE	← Etatonos
Theta			0398 03B8
Iota			0399 03B9 038A 03AF	← Iotatonos
Iotadieresis		03AA 03CA 0390		← iotadieresistonos
Kappa			039A 03BA
Lambda			039B 03BB
Mu			039C 03BC
Nu			039D 03BD
Xi			039E 03BE
Omicron			039F 03BF 038C 03CC	← Omicrontonos
Pi			03A0 03C0
Rho			03A1 03C1
Sigma			03A3 03C3 03C2		← sigmafinal
SigmaLunateSymbol	03F9 03F2
Tau			03A4 03C4
Upsilon			03A5 03C5 038E 03CD	← Upsilontonos
Upsilondieresis		03AB 03CB 03B0		← upsilondieresistonos
Phi			03A6 03C6
Chi			03A7 03C7
Psi			03A8 03C8
Omega			03A9 03C9 038F 03CE	← Omegatonos

Question 2 — suppress tonos in ccmp

Also, in the case when tonos is a separate symbol in the text, I would like to compose it in ccmp, but directly to Alpha glyph instead of Alphatonos (which is not presented in the font and is encoded in Alpha glyph now). Will this substitution break the source text if the user copy it or change the font?

script grek;
language dflt;
lookup ccmp_grek_1 {
	sub Alpha acutecomb by Alpha;
	sub Epsilon acutecomb by Epsilon;
	sub Eta acutecomb by Eta;
	sub Iota acutecomb by Iota;
	sub Omicron acutecomb by Omicron;
	sub Upsilon acutecomb by Upsilon;
	sub Omega acutecomb by Omega;
} ccmp_grek_1;