A recent update for the Kindle software introduced the ability to use any third-party font to read any ebook. This has made the process of testing text typefaces a lot easier. Before this update, testing on Kindle meant embedding the fonts on ebooks using Calibre and transferring them to my Kindle Paperwhite. This would be fine, but doing so for every minor font version soon filled my device with dozens of the same ebooks that I would never actually read…
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Rocher Color: making a variable color font
Stacking multiple fonts on top of each other is a makeshift solution for creating multicolored text in digital media. I was well aware of this when I designed Rocher. On the other hand, I so excited about it I couldn’t keep myself from releasing it even knowing the user experience would be subpar.
Things have been changing rapidly since then. Support for color fonts has seen a considerable increase in the last couple of years. On top of that, variable fonts technology has opened up another plethora of possibilities. Merit Badge, by David Jonathan Ross, was the typeface that inspired me to go into this rabbit hole and release Rocher Color. This is its story.
Scripts for Glyphs
A quick update for those who develop fonts in Glyphs. I’ve recently published my first repository in GitHub with a few open source scripts. Their functionality range from the very simple (open all/selected nodes) to the somewhat complex (an almost complete solution for exporting and importing SVGs for making color fonts).
The state of underlines and strikethroughs
Some weeks ago, while developing a custom typeface for a client, I was asked about adjusting the position and thickness of the underlines and strikethroughs. I knew it was possible to customize these values in Glyphs, Fontlab or any other font editor. But honestly, I didn’t usually bother to configure them because I knew they weren’t really enforced by most graphic software. This was a custom project, so fine-tuned underlines and strikethroughs could potentially save my client from a few headaches when typesetting documents. With that in mind, I decided to investigate further.