Twirling, Falling, Lifted by the Wind

A small content update, partly because my attention has been elsewhere, and partly because I’ve been learning about some of the technical aspects of digital font development.

Diplograph is now using a custom font, a modified version of EB Garamond called Diplograph Jaramond. The first thing I added was a new kerning pair for Ja, hence the name. The J is pronounced the same as the G in GIF.

It has:

• New kerning pairs for Ja Jo No f’ f) nT eT. The italic additionally has new kerning pairs for several swash capitals.
• A new ellipsis … with M/4 spaces between the periods.
• More space inside (parentheses), [brackets], and {braces}.
• The multiplication symbol (3×) has been lowered towards the baseline to better fit old-style figures.

In some cases these changes implement adjustments I was already making through markup and styling. But instead of wrapping every parentheses with a <span> and adding a tiny bit of padding, it’s now just a parentheses and the adjustment is encoded in a font layout feature.

A better demo and proper release of the font will come in a future update.

Because I’m now building the font from UFO sources, I’ve also switched over to using CFF2 outlines, reducing the size of the roman and italic from 63 KB to 52 KB, even after adding the new features. I’ll have to write a note about this at some point, and I’m looking at making a similar change to the fonts I don’t build from source as well.

Other Type Changes

The spacing around figures (numbers) always looked a little wrong, and I finally figured out it was because they were tabular old-style figures! They’re now correctly proportional old-style figures.

Notes

Updated: Microtypography

Heavy Rotation

Radical Romantics by Fever Ray

Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes