Andrew, that’s very interesting — I’d missed SVG text completely. Trying some experiments, I can begin to see how it could work. I’m just trying to get a sense of what kind of workflow would be necessary.
@jamessouttar Variable fonts are perfect in the DTP and desktop world, but I’m not sure they are ready or easy enough to use on web pages.
Variable Fonts (VFs) are too large IMHO, e.g. the Source Sans Italic and Regular TTF is 1Mb! Also the online ttf to woff creation tools seem to either reject VF ttfs or create a non variable woff file.
What we really need is an easy to use tool to subset only the characters, weights, style and glyphs that are used on a site, and then create a WOFF2 subset file and also an easy to implement backup subset and code for browsers that don’t support VFs.
In my searching so far, I haven’t been able to find such a tool.
Thinking further, an App where you could write your web text using easy to use word processor tools, that then subsets the characters used and also generates the html to paste in RW would be pretty handy. Technicaly this could potentially be built into RW. Is there a market for such a tool?
I can’t help thinking this is a lot of faff for a diminishing audience who can’t even recognise ital, bold and different font weight words, let alone understand what they mean.
Ask a Mellenial what a bold word signifies and they will probably shrug their shoulders. Ask them what an aubergine emoji means and they will all know instantly. Times are a changing.
I’m not sure exactly what you want to do but any SVG capable design app will allow you to style individual characters. You can even change the fonts etc, all of which are inserted into the code as font-family styles which you then reference in your @font-face as normal. The SVG does not contain the font embedded in it which is good. The code is easy to edit and add additional classes if necessary (certainly easier to edit than using the RW styled text input).
As for variable fonts, they can save a huge amount of space if you are using multiple weights, slants etc. The ones I’ve used have certainly not been anywhere near the size that @Webdeersign mentions. All mine are generally less than 2 individual variants would be which is a big win. I’ve played with them quite a lot with a variable font stack and I have to say that I’ve been very impressed. As always, I suspect, quality and size is about getting a good font file from a reputable source.
Yes agree. I’m still playing about with freely available fonts to try them.
Can you reccomend a freely available woff or woff2 VF?
This is what I use for conversion to WOFF / WOFF2. It doesn’t break the variable axes and is really easy to use, just follow the instructions and run it in terminal.
That’s good to know. Thanks.
I find that that seems to be the most recommended tool but I was somewhat put off by it being so old, going by the last updated dates. I’ll give it go.
To be honest there may well be something newer / easier but I’ve always used that and not had a problem
As Andrew says, variable fonts perform well — they’re actually amazingly small, there is now good browser support, and they give us the possibility of doing things we couldn’t do before (either fun, like type animations, or practical, like enhancing the optics — x-height, weight, width, serifs etc. — for mobile). The only drawback is that, currently, there aren’t too many of them (but that’s changing fast). The Glyphsapp website does a good job of showing off what they can do (it uses just one variable font).
Subsetting has been a problem (I just discovered now how to set up subsetting parameters in Glyphs, instead of painstakingly deleting characters, which was a delight). Sites like FontSquirrel provide some reasonable options (but I’m much more ruthless in stripping out what I don’t need, and what I do want to include is a little obscure for FS).
As for the audience, don’t underestimate them! We‘re living in a truly extraordinary typographic renaissance — there have never been as many type designers as there are now, or new offerings — and the vast majority are Millennials. (And it’s a truly international phenomenon, too — who knew that Latin Americans would become such major players, or that Indonesians would dominate funky 70s retro?) The standard of web typography is moving in leaps and bounds too. Which is why I think RW really ought to catch up with OpenType features, at least. Because, to my mind, anyway, RW is a publishing platform.
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Using the correct tool (thanks to Tav) reduced the size of both combined, down to 320Kb, but the Source Sans Var fonts contain just about every language possible, so this size is not a good representative size of all var fonts. What was I thinking?
I created a var woff2 of Libre Franklin which was 44kb, so clearly there are not as big as I was miss informing myself.
The really cool thing, though, is that you’ve not just got one font for your 44kb but a gigantic extended family in there — which (depending on the design, of course) can contain not only almost infinite gradations of weights but condensed, expanded, italicised, display, caption, the whole gamut of styles. What’s more, you can use as many as you like without any additional download hit. They can be responsive, too — not just resizing for bigger or smaller screens, but actually changing styles (so display fonts with hairlines that look great at large sizes can start to beef up as they become smaller, and text fonts can be optically adjusted as they become smaller on mobiles). And this isn’t Tomorrow’s World — we’re not waiting for browser support in 2032 — it’s all there right now! Except, of course, in RW (and I can’t help feeling that if Realmac made it super-easy for users to work with variable fonts — maybe even bundling a few with the product — that could be a really good selling point for them ).
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Excellent and very valid points.
However, to me, RW is just a simple page builder for Stacks and the support and tools will all come from a small group of innovative Stacks developers.
As Tav pointed out:
I do have a variable font stack that has quite a unique way of working. My new policy though is to wait until all the paid versions are released first to avoid “duplication” of novel features.
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Interesting
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Does anyone (apart from my dear wife) still use Firefox? 🤔😆
Seems to be answered here by Mozilla: Variable fonts guide - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN.
But all this is increasing my appetite for variable fonts (unfortunately I don’t have any yet).