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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1384448
A few years ago, Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft, with partners like FontLab, developed a new kind of fonts: variable fonts. A variable font is a family rolled into one font file, so you can smoothly travel along each design space axis. You can pick a light or a regular weight, or anything in-between! (Figure 1). Why would you want to do this? Let’s look at a few examples. Case #1: Fitting text. A frequent problem in page layout is that the desired text does not fit well into the required space. This can lead to to widows, orphans and unsightly gaps at the end of the text. Making the font just a little bit wider or narrower might fix this. Ordinarily you would have to find a font from your family that is just exactly the right width in order to do this. But since a variable font with a width axis is infinitely scalable along that axis it takes only a few seconds of experimentation to get a font that’s a perfect fit. This is really great for headlines (Figure 2). Case #2: Websites can use web fonts, which are sent by the server and used to render the displayed text. File size matters on the web: every additional web font slows down page loading. A variable font is almost always smaller than three or more static fonts of the same family, and the website can dynamically change width or weight without loading additional fonts. Case #3: Multi-script text. If you’re using, say, Hindi and English in the same text then that usually means you have to use two different font families. In these cases it would be remarkable if the two fonts had exactly the same weight. So inevitably one will look bolder than the other. However, using variable fonts, even if they’re different variable fonts, you can tweak the weight of one or both so that the weights are visually the same (Figure 3). This will make it easier for the reader, who won’t be constantly jolted by the transition from bold to regular and back. The bottom line is that variable fonts can make life easier. By using them you can avoid a lot of the fiddling with font families and save time and effort while making your pages more beautiful. For more info visit www.fontlab.com