Hypercustom: Font Build

This site now sets all of its text in its own typefaces, served from rafael.fyi with no request to a font service. Offprint, the mono, follows typewritten technical reports and RFC plain text. Scriber, the hand, follows the technical-pen lettering on patent drawing sheets. Grant, the body face, follows the Scotch roman of 19th-century letters patent. Each is about 11 KB.

Each letter is a centreline on a grid rather than a drawn outline. A script strokes the centrelines with a pen (round for Scriber and Offprint, an elliptical nib for Grant), adds serifs where a stroke ends on a guide line, and compiles the result with fontTools. One set of skeletons yields four faces, and a full rebuild takes about two seconds.

A few considerations shaped the work. The character set came from the site itself: a scan of every page found four characters the code blocks needed that the first draft lacked. Weight was matched against the old fonts at the sizes the site actually uses, 11 to 13 px, which led to a thicker pen. A monospace needs no kerning. Grant went in last and is the roughest: it has an italic now but no kerning, one weight, and spacing set by rule, and it was narrowed to 87% width to keep the old line lengths. All four are drafts, meant for release under the SIL Open Font License.

The page below steps through how each letter is built, from centreline to finished outline, beside a ghost of its first draft. It also has a type tester and downloads.