Nico Verbruggen
641c89bc1a
- The script has been unified and documentation has been added - The x-height was previously incorrectly calculated; caps and ascender are now also correct - Added instructions to set up Mac environment - Bumped version number
2.7 KiB
Readerly
Readerly is modified font based on Newsreader, while attempting to be metrically very similar to Bookerly, the default font on Kindle devices, to provide a similar reading experience.
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 metrics of Bookerly while still retaining Newsreader and keeping the font licensed under the OFL, and maybe making some mild manual edits?
The goal was to get a metrically/visually similar font, without actually copying glyphs or anything that would infringe upon the rights of the original creators; after all, Newsreader is a very beautiful font as a starting point.
To get to the final result, I decided to use the variable font and work on it. The original is located in src and is available under the same OFL as the end result, which is included in LICENSE.
Project structure
src: Newsreader variable font TTFsbuild.py: The build script to generate ReaderlyLICENSE: The OFL licenseCOPYRIGHT: Copyright information, later embedded in fontVERSION: The version number, later embedded in font
After running build.py, you should get:
out/sfd: FontForge source files (generated)out/ttf: final TTF fonts (generated)
Prerequisites
- Python 3
- fontTools — install with
pip install fonttools - FontForge — the build script auto-detects FontForge from PATH, Flatpak, or the macOS app bundle
Linux preparation
pip install fonttools
flatpak install flathub org.fontforge.FontForge
macOS preparation
On macOS, if you're using the built-in version of Python (via Xcode), you may need to first add a folder to your PATH to make font-line available, like:
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/Library/Python/3.9/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
brew install fontforge
brew unlink python3 # ensure that python3 isn't linked via Homebrew
pip3 install fonttools font-line
source ~/.zshrc
Building
python3 build.py
To customize the font family name, disable old-style kerning, or skip outline fixes:
python3 build.py --customize
The build script (build.py) uses fontTools and FontForge to transform the Newsreader variable fonts into Readerly. Configuration and step-by-step details live in the header comments of build.py.