Fraunces is a display, "Old Style" soft-serif typeface inspired by the mannerisms of early 20th century typefaces such as Windsor, Souvenir, and the Cooper Series.
This typeface family is still under development, and will be coming soon to Google Fonts.
Fraunces has the following axes:
| Axis | Tag | Range | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Optical Size | opsz | 9pt to 144pt | 144pt | Labeled 9pt, 72pt, and 144pt in instances. |
| Weight | wght | 100 to 900 | 900 | Labeled Thin, Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, and Black in instances. |
| Softness | SOFT | 000 to 100 | 100 | Labeled Sharp, Soft, and SuperSoft in instances. |
| Wonky | WONK | 0 to 1 | 1 | Binary axis controls substitution of "wonky" characters. Automatically substitutes when opsz > 18. Not listed in instances. |
The opsz axis ties together changes in contrast, x-height, spacing, and character widths. As opsz decreases, the x-height increases, spacing opens up, and the characters expand in width.
Additionally, mapping of axis values is placed in the AVAR table to create non-linear interpolation in the Variable font.
Many of the peculiar, wonky characteristics that are suitable for display usage are less desirable for more continuous reading. At certain smaller optical sizes (18px and less), the wonk axis is disabled (see below).
The wght axis spans Thin to Black. Nuff said.
The SOFT axis gives access to the softer, rounded forms that are available towards the Optical Min, but still retaining other Optical Sizing considerations, such as change in character width, spacing, tall ascenders, and shorter x-height
A binary axis that subsitutes wonk characters for more normalized characters, such as the leaning n/m/h in Roman, or the bulbous flags in the b/d/h/k/l of the Italic. In OTF or TTF instances, this can be implemented as an OpenType Stylistic Set.
From terminal, run the build script at sources/build-all.sh. Fonts output to fonts/.
NOTE: The first time you build, you will need to set up a virtual environment and install dependencies:
Setting up the build environment (Click to expand)
The basics
You will need to open a terminal to run the following commands.
Clone the repo & navigate into it:
git clone https://github.com/undercasetype/Fraunces.git
cd Fraunces
Check that you have Python 3:
which python3
It should return a path ending with python3, such as /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3. If it returns an error like python3 not found, you will need to download Python 3.
Setting up a virtual environment
To build, navigate to the Fraunces folder in a terminal (e.g. cd Fraunces), then set up the virtual environment:
cd ~
python3 -m venv venvThen activate it:
source venv/bin/activateNow, install requirements:
pip install -U -r requirements.txtOnce you have set up the environment (see above), you can build fonts & prep releases!
make build
To run Font Bakery checks, run the following:
make checks
(Or just go to the FontSpector website) and check fonts there.)
Before you build, you might want to bump the major or minor font versions with bumpfontversion.
For example, to bump the minor version of all UFOs:
bumpfontversion --part minor sources/*/*.ufo
If you are doing any work on this repo, please read the production notes here.
If you are looking for notes on making GitHub Release packages, see mastering/README.md.
