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Comment by ryanwhitney | Hacker News Reader

Looks good! I haven't seen many variable fonts around yet. The samples include mock notebooks and poster layouts, but I'd love to see examples of it being used in an actual interface. (Outside of the site, which uses it.)

Also—not mentioned too prominently on the site—but it's open source as well! Awesome work. https://github.com/rsms/inter

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TeX can use other fonts, but the default set of fonts used in TeX are "variable fonts". The term Knuth used was "metafonts", which is why the font-rasterizing program he wrote for TeX is called METAFONT. So you've probably read a number of books and many papers typeset in "variable fonts", as well as most of the math formulas on Wikipedia and in Jupyter.

In fact Knuth wrote a wonderful article explaining the idea. The article is available online, and is just an explanation but a superb performance — “The Concept of a Meta-Font”, by Donald E. Knuth, in Visible Language, XVI 1 (Winter 1982): https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/16.1/... (Republished in the book/collection Digital Typography.) So he seems to have invented the idea, at least as far as computers go.

It's more accurate to say they were variable fonts. The Computer Modern used by modern LaTeX distributions was converted from METAFONT to Type 1 in 1992. In the process, specific parameter values had to be chosen - in my opinion, chosen badly, so as to make modern Computer Modern very difficult to read on screen at small sizes because it's too darn light. :(

Reasonable replacements included in most LaTeX distributions include the XCharter or libertine packages for text fonts; eulervm or newtxmath for math fonts; or mathpazo for both.

The team behind the iA Writer app recently released three variable fonts with an open source licence on Github. Details here:

https://ia.net/writer/blog/a-typographic-christmas

Woah! I've followed their work and loved Nitti after finding it in their app, but I missed this. Thanks for sharing.

It's actually used on GitHub's homepage when you're logged out.

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