When I was doing my usual font tweaking for my ebook-fonts repository, I stumbled upon variable fonts exporting. Doing this for Newsreader gave me some interesting results at small optical sizes: the font was now reminding me of Bookerly.

I asked myself the question: how close can we get to the visual appearance of Bookerly while still retaining Newsreader and keeping the font licensed under the OFL?

The goal is to get a metrically/visually similar font, without actually copying glyphs or anything that would infringe upon the rights of the original creators.

To accomplish this, I wanted to start from the 9pt font, which I exported. Then, it was a matter of playing around with scripts and manual edits to see if I could get something that was optically close enough.

Project structure

./src: Newsreader variable font TTFs (source of truth)
./scripts: FontForge Python scripts applied during the build
- scale.py: scales lowercase glyphs vertically to increase x-height
- metrics.py: sets vertical metrics (OS/2 Typo, Win, hhea)
- lineheight.py: adjusts OS/2 Typo metrics to control line spacing
- rename.py: updates font name metadata from Newsreader to Readerly
./src_processed: intermediate files after instancing/processing (generated)
./out: final TTF fonts (generated)

Building

python3 build.py

This uses fontTools.instancer and the Flatpak version of FontForge to:

Instance the variable fonts into static TTFs at configured axis values (opsz, wght)
Scale lowercase glyphs (configurable in scripts/scale.py)
Set vertical metrics, adjust line height, and update font names
Export to TTF with old-style kerning in ./out

Variant configuration (in build.py):

Regular: wght=400, opsz=9
Bold: wght=550, opsz=9
Italic: wght=400, opsz=9
BoldItalic: wght=550, opsz=9