It’s more the case that the weight axis is common, and commonly understood, so the Google Fonts front end just leaves out any axis that isn’t Weight or Italic, I guess as a “UX” consideration. It’s unfortunate. The good news is, the Google Fonts API (the thing that serves fonts and CSS based on specific URLs) _does_ handle the other axes.
So, the Recursive minisite has a configuration tool (under the “Get Recursive” button) that makes it easy to get Google Fonts embed code for all axes.
Different variable fonts use different variable “axes” – choosing what parameters can/should be variable is just another design decision in making a font.
Can you perhaps say more about what you dislike about the lowercase “m”? It has to be extremely condensed to fit into a fixed-width space, just the same as any other monospaced font for code.
Thanks for checking out the font. As the main maker of it, I would love for it to include Cyrillic & Greek characters (and Arabic & Thai & more...), but this font’s variable axes mean that it is veeery slow to draw additional characters for (they have to be drawn in 12 or 24 different styles for things to work). But:
1. If someone wants to contribute the work in a PR, or the funding for work, I would be happy to extend the character set.
2. The font sticks to the most common width for monospaced fonts, so many fonts that do include Cyrillic & Greek glyphs will work elegantly as fallbacks. I recommend IBM Plex Mono, for one free + open-source option that is particularly good. Or, of course, you could just use Plex for everything, and you wouldn’t be wrong.
Thanks, it has been a fun project to work on, and you are correct about variable fonts offering more range in fewer bytes!
Another thing worth considering in a “page bloat” debate is that while a very extensive variable font is maybe 300 kb, that size is fairly average for a JPEG, but you can do far more with a variable font.
Haha, well spotted. Yeah, it seems to maybe be an issue of how Google Fonts sends preview text to the URL, and the “+” conflicts with the general separator. I’ve sent a message to the folks over there, and hopefully they will put it in their backlog to fix.
The font definitely has the “+” symbol, along with many other math & currency glyphs (and many more).
Please check it out (and try the preview/tester) at:
Can I ask what software you ran into that issue with? Probably, it was a strict-monospace environment, like vim in a terminal. I have created code-specific fonts to deal with this issue:
there are fonts made specifically for code which have code ligatures & the simple l, f, 6, & 9 frozen in, if you like these features but don’t want to mess with OpenType features (or if your code editor doesn’t support that).
The issue doesn’t occur in web browsers, as far as I know, as they support proportional type (include mostly-mono families with a few proportional glyphs).
Also, there are fonts made specifically for code which have code ligatures & the simple l, f, 6, & 9 frozen in, if you like these features but don’t want to mess with OpenType features (or if your code editor doesn’t support that).
Yeah, we tried to pack maybe a few too many fun features into the minisite, so it is unfortunately a bit more laggy than ideal. Thanks for checking it out, though!
What is your OS & OS version? This has generally gotten better over the past couple of years.
You can also use the static fonts, however, which don’t have vector overlaps, and Will therefore avoid this issue. In fact, it you were working on print design, it would probably still be better to use static fonts at this point.
Thank you for saying more, chrisdalke! I actually tried to post the font’s website, but because it was already posted last year, hacker news wouldn’t allow me to submit the link again.