Hack variable font design

[chrissimpkins]

I propose that we consider a transition to a variable font design for the v5.000 release of the Hack typeface with (tentatively) the following design axes:

• weight ( ~ultralight to semibold designs)
• width ( ~condensed to expanded designs)
• optical size

This will allow us to address open requests for condensed width designs, expand the weight support (maybe not as important for source, but perhaps for other scenarios where Hack is used), and use new OpenType technology to further optimize shapes with improved granularity of design decisions at the small sizes that are used on the screen by many source code developers.

It looks like this will be a big effort that will involve revisions of the outlines across most glyphs in the sets based on a bit of exploration to date. But this will afford us the opportunity to clean up the outlines that this non-designer sullied, and define a more refined design and set of build artifacts. IMO this is a move in a better direction for the project.

For those who would like a nice introduction to variable font technology, see John Hudson's overview on Medium.

PoC work is starting in the hack-varfont branch concurrent with the ongoing work on the v4.000 release that is taking place in branches based off of dev. The source is currently defined in the *.glyphs source spec and there is no fontmake build process in place to date if you check out the branch to explore it.

Those who build test fonts can test them on the Axis Praxis site.

Please discuss. Look forward to your feedback!

[zhimoe]

great, really hope a condense version(half width), but it seems source code variable ttf are not render as well as source code pro ttf on win 10，blurry. hope hack could do better

[chrissimpkins]

I hope to! Let's see what time allows. Always open to anyone else out there who wants to contribute width masters.

[jonesnc]

I'd really like to see this. Is there any word on the status of this?