The Foundry

How a letter gets made

1. 01

   A skeleton, not an outline

   Real fonts store the silhouette of each letter — the closed shape the ink fills. This page stores something older and much smaller: the path a pen would take. An A is three lines, an O is four curves, an S is six. Every character lives in a box one unit tall, with the baseline at zero and the cap line at one, and it is written down in about sixty characters of path data. The whole alphabet is shorter than this paragraph.

2. 02

   Then the pen gets an opinion

   A skeleton on its own is a wireframe. What turns it into a typeface is what happens to the stroke: how heavy it is, how much it leans, whether it thins out when it runs sideways, whether the curves bulge towards a circle or flatten towards a rectangle, and what it does at the ends. Those are the eight dials. They are applied on the way to the screen, not baked in, which is why the tray of characters rearranges itself while you drag.

3. 03

   Contrast is just arithmetic

   The thick-and-thin that makes a face look engraved rather than drawn with a marker comes from one line of code: each little piece of stroke is measured for how horizontal it is, and the more horizontal it runs the thinner it is drawn. Curves are chopped into ten pieces first, so the weight swells and tapers round an O the way it would under a broad nib held at an angle. At zero contrast every piece is the same width and the face goes monolinear.

What the date decides

The day's number is turned into a cut: a weight somewhere between hairline and ultra, a width between compressed and wide, an upright or an italic — most days are upright, a few lean, and roughly one day in ten leans backwards, which is a terrible idea and worth seeing. It picks a contrast, a roundness, a letterfit, one of three stroke finishes, and how far the strokes overrun their corners, which is the difference between a tidy face and one that looks handset by somebody in a hurry. Then it picks a name and a class, because a face without a name is just a diagram.

The class is read back out of the numbers rather than chosen: high contrast makes a Didone, a moderate amount makes an Antique, very round curves with no contrast make a Geometric, flattened ones a Rectilinear, and anything heavy and plain is a Poster. It is the same taxonomy a catalogue would use, applied to a face the catalogue has never seen.

Lowercase is not a separate alphabet here. Type in lower case and you get small capitals — the same skeletons at a smaller scale — which makes this a unicase face, an old and slightly stubborn idea. The small caps dial decides how much smaller; push it to 100% and the distinction disappears entirely.

Things worth trying

Contrast at maximum with the weight low and the roundness high: a fragile, engraved thing that only works large. Weight at maximum with roundness low and a flat finish: a slab of a face that looks stencilled onto a crate. Overshoot up with the weight down: the strokes shoot past their corners and the letters start to look like they were built out of matchsticks. And the tracking dial, pushed hard, will tell you which of these letters are actually the right width and which have been getting away with it.

The integer behind all of this is the one that draws the field on the front page, and it has twenty-one other jobs: it grows the Garden, writes the Chimes, deals the Lattice, files the Almanac, scatters the Observatory, raises the Atlas, breeds the Menagerie, lights the Orrery, invents the Codex, runs the Chronicle, builds the Folly, cuts the gears of the Engine, threads the Loom, opens the Exchange, sets the rules of the Gambit, locks the doors of the Warren, arranges the corridor in the Inquest, cuts the gorge under the Span, works the timetable at the Junction and enciphers the dispatch at the Bureau. Nothing here is saved between visits and nothing is downloaded to make it: tomorrow this face is melted down and a different one is cut in its place.