A new Wakamai Fondue

Roel Nieskens · April 12

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! 🫕

Johannes Neumeier · April 14

Congrats @Roel Nieskens This is such a valuable tool, very cool to see it gets continuous dev work

Roel Nieskens · April 15

I forgot to say, if you drop your fonts and see something unexpected, I'd love to know. Features being reported incorrectly on, example incomplete, stuff not working, I'll take any bug report. Nothing like the keen eye of the person who developed the font!

Feel free to reach out to me here, or typo.social, or old school email.

Typedesigner · April 19

This is a very useful tool! Can this tool be integrated into own website, and if so, is there a guide on how to do it?

Roel Nieskens · May 6

Currently there is no guide, but you're comfortable in HTML/JS/CSS you could either clone the Wakamai Fondue website and use that as a basis to create your own version to be incorporated in any website, or you use the underlying engine that does all the parsing and build a website around those results. It requires getting down and dirty with the code, though. The code can be found here.

However, I am working on two ideas that might be helpful:

1. "Send to Wakamai Fondue" functionality, which is a button you can place on your own site and sends your font to Wakamai Fondue. This way folks can inspect the font and get its CSS in a familiar environment. Basically a remote "Try with ..."-button, the green one in the circle currently using XYZ Type's Polymode.

2. White-label reports, which allows you to configure and generate a Wakamai Fondue page completely to your wishes. Can be with default styling, or bare-bones HTML/JS/CSS to be expanded upon by yourself. This can be used to for full reports like Wakamai Fondue does now, or you can cherry-pick components to be used on your site. Only the type tester, only the character grid, only the CSS, etc.

(Related, there is also the possibility to sponsor Wakamai Fondue by buying the "Try with ..."-button ad space, and make your font the fondue's "font of the month"!)

Mark Davis · May 12

thank you for the hard work behind the scenes and under-the hood—I was so happy when i no longer had to remember to click the “beta” button any longer

it feels so good to use

Roel Nieskens · May 14

Yeah, sorry you had to do that for way too long 😅 Happy fondueing!

Alfonso García · May 22

Thank you!

mitradranirban · May 23

What I found that in Wakamai fondue characters present are not shown in my NagMundari font or Noto Color emoji font. Is this because they have a different CMAP table and do not have characters in ASCII group?

Roel Nieskens · May 26

@mitradranirban Thanks, that indeed got broken in the meantime, it seems. I'm tracking it here and will fix it!

Roel Nieskens · June 2

I forgot to report the issue is fixed, @mitradranirban!

Also, as of today Wakamai Fondue can load installed/system fonts through the Local Font Access API. This is only available in Chromium browsers, but hopefully soon elsewhere.

https://wakamaifondue.com/

It will show all fonts, of which many fonts that aren't simply OTF, TTF or WOFF(2) fonts. TTC, legacy formats, huge files, etc. can't be read by the fondue.

I still hope this is useful for local testing.

And on that subject: I'm working on tooling that'll help with repeated checks in Wakamai Fondue. Stuff that'd make it easier for font designers and engineers to save and refresh a report without needing to manually drag-and-drop fonts.

If you have any ideas or requests regarding that, I'd love to hear them!

mitradranirban · June 3

Thanks for always keeping the wakamaifondue app useful

Dave Crossland · June 5

You might like to study https://fontbureau.github.io/TypeRoof and chat with @Lasse Fister as he has also written some js for handling dropped fonts

A new Wakamai Fondue

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