is this for someone that doesn't have access to proper typesetting software? i guess that could be cool if along side the font size you have a radius entry for programs that do not have a type-on-path tool. i'm just spoiled and have the proper tools so this causes me to tilt my head and ask why

It's not just about curving the baseline, the glyphs themselves curve according to the user-specified curve radius. Check out the second image/gif with curve optimizations on/off.

What font features enable this? (curious how it is implemented and which software supports it)

From what I can tell, it's a variable font, where the font developer can declare an axis (in this case "curve," or more likely "CURV") and the font user can control the value of that axis (e.g. via CSS) which controls how the font renders itself.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Font...

This site demonstrates many highly stylized and artistic variable font axes:

https://www.axis-praxis.org/specimens/__DEFAULT__

I use a circular font I made in inkscape for outputting SVGs to GatorCAM for CNC.

Inkscape lets me adjust kern of each letter because the curve can cause letters to touch.

This is about how each character adapts to the radius, not the path itself. Each character is tweaked so the design holds up as it’s curved. I don’t think you have tools to do that.

FWIW, people have glyph warping text (both on and off paths) using tools like Adobe Illustrator for as long as I can remember. I also don't quite get why one might want a capability that supports one type of glyph warping in the typeface itself.

A font is designed to have certain attributes (e.g. harmony between the letters). It is not clear that this harmony is preserved if you distort the font algorithmically. For this font the designer ensured that it is preserved.

I get that part (I've designed commercial typefaces), but as I understand it, (1) this only works for type on circles or circular arcs, and (2) the typeface has no awareness of the circle/segment it's on, so the designer still has to manually match the Curve property to the radius.

I think this is really cool and interesting work by Nick Sherman. I just wonder if I'm correct about the limited applications, and what could be done to enable the kind of "contextual intelligence" that would enable fonts to better optimize themselves for a broader set of types of envelope deformations.

Because it allows the effect of the curvature to be customized by hand for each letter shape by a skilled designer. Fonts like italics, bold or condensed can also be approximated with simple geometric operations, but I think you would agree that that looks terrible.

I'm out of the loop on pricing models for fonts, but is it normal to base it on number of visitors to your site?

Yes, and this pricing is quite reasonable too.

I'm even more outside the loop, what happens if on my personal blog I don't have any analytics and don't do any metering so I have no idea how many visitors I get?

The way these kinds of fonts work is that you don't host the font, they do. You link the font licence you purchased through your HTML code (or CSS, depending on how the foundry recommends you to apply the font) with a specific font URL that they provide you, which will contain unique identifiers. Then they can track how often the font gets loaded.

If your site really kicks off and you max out those visits per month (that they track on their end), they either start charging you the higher tier, cut off loading your font, or send you stern emails.

There is no expectation that you share your analytics with a type foundry.

> You link the font licence you purchased through your HTML code

Ugh, hard pass for me. It a nice font thought

Not to take away from your fantastic explanation but I should note that’s not universal. There are foundries that operate on an honor basis and let you self host the font too.

Noted, I thought Future Fonts did the same system as many other type foundries out there, evidently not. Thanks for letting me know.

That’s not true. I’ve bought fonts on Future Fonts and I received a download link to get the files. I think it’s fundamentally an honor system.

My bad, I assumed Future Fonts did something similar to other type foundries. Thanks for letting me know!

When there's a license you're either violating the license agreement or you're not. That's not an honor system.

No, "honor system" is very frequently used and understood to refer to a system where there are explicit rules but where the rules are not enforced via active surveillance.

It sounds like you want to make a judgement call: "they're too small to enforce this license agreement," so you get to pretend it's an honor system and not a license agreement.

The context was whether there is automatic enforcement, not whether you need to abide by the license.

Who's going to verify whether or not you're violating the license?

God

What you describe is how Google Fonts handles this if you choose to use the fonts directly from Google's servers. This is a violation of GDPR. You can also download them and host them yourself, to comply with data protection laws.

https://cookie-script.com/blog/google-fonts-and-gdpr

This is a good thing to point people at when they claim that GDPR is simple to implement. This legal interpretation is totally reasonable but it’s probably not what most developers would expect.

The law itself is very clear and concise so it is straightforward to find that this is not only a reasonable interpretation but right there in the law.

I would not describe 88 pages as concise.

Regardless, my point is just that there are implications of the GDPR that a lot of engineers are probably not aware of. It makes sense that sending your traffic to Google for fonts violates GDPR. But as an engineer, this is just a CDN. I would not have considered this a violation of GDPR without seeing someone else point it out.

This is consistent with photo licensing, which is often scaled based on the potential number of viewers for both print and digital.

> This is consistent with photo licensing

On the contrary, I would say this is increasingly unusual nowadays. There are print restrictions on e.g. iStock content, but there's no attempt to "ration" the number of visitors that see a stock photo at a specific price point.

It's something that's generally put me off from licensing paid fonts - despite the work that has gone into them, because you're almost signing a blank cheque and it's not easy to know how many visitors are scraping content for LLMs.

Yes

Depends on the vendor… some also prevent things like subsetting or rely on methods for counting usage that slow down pages (Typekit)

Hug of death, it seems. https://hex.xyz/news/2/ has some info about the font.

The definition of just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Giving me a migraine.

Not sure what you mean, and I'm not that versed in typography but as a graphic designer I'd bet people who actually know typography would appreciate something like this: laying out normal typefaces along a curve distort the space between letters and the top and bottom edges of letters won't follow the curvature they're being traced to until you do "manual" work (unless there's some auto-warping solution for fonts in something like Illustrator I am not aware of).

Of course this is not meant for prose texts or something, but for logo design this is a great thing to have.

Animated GIF from article shows what a "curve variable font" does:

https://incremental-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/slid...

Very cool

The 'N' in particular is very worth watching. There are really no good answers, but at least an intentional answer is better than an accidental answer.

I feel the result looks more like IV than an N

And the E looks fantastic in my opinion!

Red Hot Chili Peppers!

Hmm I wonder how hard it would be to incorporate into maps. There's often a big problem laying out road labels legibly along windy roads.

Google Maps, since it is WebGL-based, I think would not support these advanced font rendering features out of the box. Probably could be added?

Troika text (a font-to-signed-distance-functions tool) can do a lot of the heavy lifting of using fonts in WebGL apps. It can also do the process of converting from font data to SDFs in glsl, so it's fast. No idea if it supports variable fonts these days though. https://github.com/protectwise/troika/tree/main/packages/tro...

Bit of an aside but that site is truly awesome. Good to see some real design chops out there. I could browse those fonts for hours.

I think your license has a typo that inverts the meaning:

> This license does now allow for the fonts to be embedded in software apps or e-books.

Surprised this wasn't already a thing. What did people do before? Manually warp it?

If the curve radius is not too small, normal text with unaltered characters might look ok.

Some vector graphics software allows you to deform objects to conform to a path. Text can easily be transformed to editable path objects.

Example in Inkscape:

https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/103080/ink...

Yea, that’s what I first thought. “Surely, designers encounter this situation all the time and they already do this!?!?” I guess not.

Create text in higher resolution, rasterize it, warp it would be my process, if I needed to curve the characters themselves too. In case I didn't, because the shape is not that small compared to the text, simply wrapping around the shape works. Usually there's a tool to create a path, and then text can go along that path, as if the path were its baseline.

Beautiful.

This curve variable is very cool! It will be interesting to see if this becomes a new standard integrated into other variable types.