Khaled Hosny

I wanted to design a set of European digits for my font Astrolabe (https://aliftype.com/astrolabe/english).

I don’t usually do that, but I thought digits would be easy. I went for slab serif and old-style as it felt like a good fit. I tried to get some “inspirations” but I think I ended up basically copying @tiro_j@typo.social’s Slabo (and messed it up in the process). I added both proportional and tabular sets. I added also numerators and denominators.

The result looks OK, but I can’t do Latin design even if my life depended on it.

Here are some samples next to Arabic text, and comparison with existing Arabic digits.

RE: @fontra@typo.social

The blog post is a very interesting write-up, I suggest everyone interested in the font making to read it.

The technical part at the end is the most interesting to me. I’m particular proud of the very neat trick that allows #Fontra to emulate glyph positioning while maintaining interaction between it and manually written feature code.

For context. Font editors will generate positioning features from kerning and anchor data in the font.

Sometimes one wants to add some other feature code before or after the generated ones (e.g. move a dot contextual after being positioned by the default anchor to avoid a clash that happens only in a certain context). The order of the generated and manual code is important, since one might depend on the output of the other.

RE: @behdad@typo.social

If it is good for Knuth, it is good for me I guess.