Readerly

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: folder containing all Readerly source files
• ./scripts: some experimental scripts

Goal

• Increase the vertical sizing of the font by 5-10% (metrics.py)
• Update the xheight to be closer to what Bookerly looks like (xheight.py)
• This should apply to all fonts
• A separate "export" script should be added that generates TTF fonts (with old style kerning)

In the end, I want to be able to run a script, build.py, which should:

• Use the flatpak version of FontForge
• Copy the ./src files to ./mutated
• Apply the edits mentioned above
• Export the fonts to TTF in ./out

I will then manually review the fonts.