A new Wakamai Fondue
When I first discovered that a font could do much more than just plop drawings of letters on the screen, I felt like I’d been let in on a big secret. Characters could change their appearance, their position, the whole atmosphere of the text, all based on nearby characters or on features you could turn on and off. Magic!
But I also felt frustrated as to why this was so hidden. Why didn’t they just tell me all the cool things my font could do? Why would every new .ttf or .woff2 file make me ask myself, “what can my font do?”
I figured we needed something that would lift the curtains and hoods on fonts, and expose all the cool innards. So I took to the couch.
Prototype? More like amateurtotype, right?!
While the TV showed a balloon-lipped lady declaring her eternal love for an unnecessarily shirtless macho man she met on a island just a few hours earlier, I flipped open the laptop on the couch next to my wife, and started a hunt for JavaScript-based tooling that could help me figure out what a font could do. I knew the amazing FontTools/TTX and found a browser-compatible equivalent in Fontkit. I just started tinkering with Vue, and before the aforementioned lady, now wearing a bikini made of at most 17 molecules, had moved on to her next soulmate because he had even less neck, I had a working prototype that dumped a list of a font’s OpenType features on the screen.
Wakamai Fondue v1.0
When the full prototype was released as Wakamai Fondue a few weeks into 2018, a lot of people found it useful. And I was happy! People were finally able to explore what their fonts could do. There was even proper CSS that you could just copy and paste and use. Fist bumps all around!
But it remained a prototype-turned-production thing. It was a bit messy, Fontkit didn’t allow me to dig deep enough sometimes, and there were improvements to make to the generated CSS.
So, immediately the plan was made to release a proper version.
What took you so long
Dave Crossland of Google Fonts offered to fund a proper release, with the code released to the public under an open source license. Being paid for this and making the source available for everyone made both my brain hemispheres high five eachother. I was going to make Wakamai Fondue so much better!
Then, stuff happened. A pandemic. The collapse of online social networks. Raising two little troublemakers. Leaving the stability of my employer to become an independent developer. The curse of having your JavaScript build system fail colossally from simply sitting untouched for a while. Stale code getting staler. Deranged lunatics at the wheel of the world. Bye bye motivation, it was nice knowing you.
And then!!
Somehow, I got back on my feet, dusted off the codebase with help of a few volunteers, got rid of all the JavaScript/framework cobwebs, and started on finishing the better and newer features I started working on a few years earlier.
So what’s cookin’, good lookin’?
Okay then! So what is all this that’s so much better and newer and amazinger? In short:
- New Engine: We switched from FontKit to LibFont for more reliable and detailed font analysis.
- Better Reports: In-depth reports on all complexities of your font. The relevant CSS is shown for each and every thing your font can do, so it’s incredibly easy to use it on the web.
- Better Testing: the fondue now features both a standard “word processor” style tester, as well as specialized tools to explore specifics, like all aspects of variable fonts, color fonts, and OpenType features.
- Modern CSS Generation: you can now unlock the font’s full potential with customizable CSS output, at different complexity levels, all while using the bestest of best practices.
There’s also a cool font to demonstrate the stuff Wakamai Fondue does, more metadata being reported on, better font size control, a categorized character map, you can now drop a font anywhere, and lots of other small improvements.
Please do check it out at wakamaifondue.com!
I will do a proper guide through the new stuff soon, but until then, please give the new version a spin and let me know if anything’s off. Or on! I love to hear it all.
And remember, if you ever wonder “what can my font do?”, use Wakamai Fondue!