hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

Drop #754 (2026-01-06): Typography Tuesday

hrbrmstr

The Art Of Text (Rendering); A Font With Built In TeX Syntax Highlighting; Featured Free Font: Google Sans Flex

First TT of 2026!

TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop. Ollama and MiniMax M2.1.)

It messed up the links. No changes to the prompt or model. The system was under some heavy load, though.

The Art Of Text (Rendering)

In an ideal world, technology should just work without us having to think about it. In general, most folks take life for granted that when we type a message or open a website, the letters look exactly how they are supposed to. But behind every smooth curve of an “s” and every sharp corner of a “t” lies a complex world of engineering that most humans never see. This talk from the 39th Chaos Communication Congress dives into the messy, fascinating, and surprisingly difficult art of real time text rendering. Well, it’s likely not surprising to y’all since we cover that part of typography at least 2-3x a year.

The speaker, Nicolas Rougier, a neuroscience researcher who fell into the world of typography while building data visualization tools, explains that rendering text is far more than just slapping a letter on a screen. It involves navigating a labyrinth of rules about how characters interact, how they should be spaced, and how to make them readable on everything from a giant 4k glowing rectangle to a wee one one a smartphone. He shares some hilarious and cringeworthy examples of what happens when these rules are ignored, like video game interfaces that accidentally turn “click” into a much ruder word because the spacing between letters was slightly off.

The presentation walks you through the evolution of how computers handle text, moving from basic character sets to the universal world of Unicode. You will learn about the hidden geometry of your favorite fonts and the clever tricks software engineers use to make text appear crisp using your computers graphics processor. Whether he is talking about the delicate balance of hinting or the high tech math of signed distance fields, the speaker keeps things engaging and grounded in real world examples that anyone can appreciate.

If you have ever been curious about the invisible infrastructure that makes the world of digitized Unicode symbols readable, this is a must watch. It is a perfect blend of technical deep dive and creative appreciation for the artistry that goes into every single pixel on your screen. If you carve out some time to catch the full session, I can nigh guarantee you’ll walk away with a newfound respect for every letter you type.

A Font With Built In TeX Syntax Highlighting

This second presentation leans heavily on a topic we covered in September 2025

In a recent talk, Rajeesh Nambiar presented a project — “A font with built-in TeX syntax highlighting” — that uses the same technique in the aforementioned post to make TeX look less horrible without requiring JavaScript.

The presentation explores how modern fonts are actually dynamic software rather than static images. By using OpenType features like contextual alternates, they built a state machine into the font that recognizes TeX control sequences and math symbols, automatically changing their colors as you type. This approach solves real-world issues, such as speeding up wiki page loads and avoiding the security risks associated with some standard LaTeX packages.

It is another spiffy look at how font engineering can solve programming problems in unexpected ways. Rajeesh walks through the technical hurdles, the history of color font standards, and the future potential of using things like WebAssembly within typography. If you want to see this in action or learn how a font can actually be programmable, I highly recommend checking out the full recording and the source code details on his blog and at GitLab.

One thing did occur to me after this second example of adding such complexity to a font: much like browsers, how hard is it going to be for someone to spin up a whole new font rendering engine? Sure, we have solid open source solutions, but the more complex we make fonts (or web standards) the longer it will be before someone manages to magick up a new one. The tradeoffs are likely worth it, but I think we should, in general, be a tad more careful about increasing complexity in any domain.

Google built their empire scraping the open web, harvesting our data, and converting public knowledge into private profit. So when they release something actually useful under an open license, the only sensible response is to take it.

Google Sans Flex is a variable font with six adjustable axes: weight, width, optical size, slant, grade, and roundedness. I do have to give it to them as it is very well-engineered. Most of that is likely due to Font Bureau’s David Berlow who led the design.

The roundedness axis is worth noting. It controls how soft or sharp the letterforms appear. Dialed toward soft, you get that faux-friendly Google vibe. Dialed toward sharp, you get something more technical, more serious—and more distinctly not Google. The grade axis adjusts stroke thickness without changing character width, useful for dark mode and accessibility. Width and slant add more room to deviate.

The variable nature is the real gift here. You can tune the font just far enough from Google’s brand identity that nobody associates your work with theirs. Same quality typeface, none of the aesthetic baggage.

Use it in commercial projects. Embed it. Modify it. Redistribute derivatives. Just don’t sell the font file itself.

They’ve taken plenty. Take this back.

FIN

Remember, you can follow and interact with the full text of The Daily Drop’s free posts on:

  • Mastodon via @dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev@dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev
  • Bluesky via <https://bsky.app/profile/dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev.web.brid.gy>

☮️

, , ,

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.