HarfBuzz 1.4 Brings OpenType GX / Font Variations

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HarfBuzz 1.4 Brings OpenType GX / Font Variations

There's a new release available of the HarfBuzz text shaping library used by projects like Qt, Pango, GTK, LibreOffice, Firefox, and many other software projects. HarfBuzz 1.4 is a significant release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HarfBuzz-1.4-Released

[SomeGuy]

As a web developer that has used webfonts, the idea that I could essentially blend between different 'fonts' in a family to my taste is ridiculously cool. I'm not sure how it's exposed to a web developer ( "monospace( {bold: 0.73, italic: 0.1, ...} )" ), but I'm excited.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

What makes HardBuzz 1.4 significant

[CrystalGamma]

As a web developer that has used webfonts, the idea that I could essentially blend between different 'fonts' in a family to my taste is ridiculously cool. I'm not sure how it's exposed to a web developer ( "monospace( {bold: 0.73, italic: 0.1, ...} )" ), but I'm excited.

I expect you will have to make different @font-face blocks pointing to the same file, but with different values.

[ldo17]

As a web developer that has used webfonts, the idea that I could essentially blend between different 'fonts' in a family to my taste is ridiculously cool.

This is a very old idea. I was messing around with Apple’s late QuickDraw GX graphics/type system back in 1994, and Adobe’s Multiple Masters technology dates from around the same time.

According to this interview, while font-design tools have been acquiring all kinds of parametric, even scripting, capability, it seems like parametric type rendering has never been very popular.