thundernixon

It’s more the case that the weight axis is common, and commonly understood, so the Google Fonts front end just leaves out any axis that isn’t Weight or Italic, I guess as a “UX” consideration. It’s unfortunate. The good news is, the Google Fonts API (the thing that serves fonts and CSS based on specific URLs) _does_ handle the other axes.

So, the Recursive minisite has a configuration tool (under the “Get Recursive” button) that makes it easy to get Google Fonts embed code for all axes.

Can you perhaps say more about what you dislike about the lowercase “m”? It has to be extremely condensed to fit into a fixed-width space, just the same as any other monospaced font for code.

Thanks for checking out the font. As the main maker of it, I would love for it to include Cyrillic & Greek characters (and Arabic & Thai & more...), but this font’s variable axes mean that it is veeery slow to draw additional characters for (they have to be drawn in 12 or 24 different styles for things to work). But:

1. If someone wants to contribute the work in a PR, or the funding for work, I would be happy to extend the character set.

2. The font sticks to the most common width for monospaced fonts, so many fonts that do include Cyrillic & Greek glyphs will work elegantly as fallbacks. I recommend IBM Plex Mono, for one free + open-source option that is particularly good. Or, of course, you could just use Plex for everything, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Small type can lose definition on screen just as much as in print, so “inktraps” are really just there to help make things more crisp in text.

Of course, they are there just as much for aesthetics if the type is used at large sizes.

A beloved classic. Thanks for trying it out, and thanks for the kind words!

Thanks, it has been a fun project to work on, and you are correct about variable fonts offering more range in fewer bytes!

Another thing worth considering in a “page bloat” debate is that while a very extensive variable font is maybe 300 kb, that size is fairly average for a JPEG, but you can do far more with a variable font.

The font is under the OFL license, and you can definitely host it on your own server, no connection to Google required.

Yeah, we tried to pack maybe a few too many fun features into the minisite, so it is unfortunately a bit more laggy than ideal. Thanks for checking it out, though!