East Asian / CJK – Variable Fonts

⚠️ Notice: As a showcase of variable fonts, this site requires a web browser that supports OpenType font variation technology. It looks like your browser doesn’t, so please consider upgrading to one that does (the latest versions of Chrome work well, even on older operating systems). Otherwise, the font samples below will only appear as static fonts.

East Asian / CJK

Variable fonts with character support for East Asian / CJK

2 results

White On Black VF

  • White On Black VF
  • Black On White VF
1 1000

White On Black VF is a special-purpose variable font with just one glyph (㊎) demonstrating an issue related to the non-zero winding rule used for rendering fonts. The issue is especially problematic when negative glyphs are reversed out of a positive background shape. The weight axis also shows how the technique for avoiding the problem with static fonts – removing overlaps – isn’t a viable solution for variable fonts because the topology of overlapping shapes may change across variations. The counterpart font, Black On White VF, is made with the same shapes but with an additional circular path, showing how the issue is not present with more typical positive-on-negative glyphs. The fonts were produced by Ken Lunde using a glyph designed by Ryoko Nishizuka.

Tags: sans, CFF, dingbats, proof of concept, multiplexed, woman-designed
Design:Ryoko Nishizuka
Publisher:Adobe
Characters:East Asian / CJK
Released:2019-05-28
Licensing:Open source

Source Han VF Proto

  • Source Han VF Proto
    No sample available
  • Source Han Serif VF Proto
    No sample available
  • Source Han Sans VF Proto
    No sample available
200 900
75 100

These prototype fonts were built by Ken Lunde and his colleagues at Adobe for developers to test support for “variable font collections” that combine the technologies for both variable fonts and font collections. The fonts simulate the structure (styles, glyphs, character mapping, features, etc) of Source Han (Serif & Sans) and Noto CJK, but only contain a dozen or so functional glyphs, repeated thousands of times. Lunde’s introduction explains how variable font collections can greatly reduce file sizes for type systems with expansive character support, like Pan-CJK fonts for typesetting East Asian scripts.

Tags: serif, sans, CFF, proof of concept
Design:Adobe
Publisher:Adobe
Characters:East Asian / CJK, Hangul, Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, dingbats/emoji, Vietnamese
Released:2019-02-01
Licensing:Open source