rotulo

Monoline typeface generated from skeletons: strokes of lines and arcs expanded with a round pen.

Every letter is a skeleton of straight lines and arcs drawn in code, never a hand-drawn outline. The generator expands each skeleton with a round pen and writes TrueType and WOFF2 fonts. Weight is the pen width, so the family is a variable font from 200 to 700. Floating details (dots, accents, the zero slash, punctuation) are a second color layer. A reading cut, Lectura, adds weight, spacing and letters that are hard to mirror.

Install

npm install @npmegar/rotulo
pip install rotulo

The TTF files are attached to each GitHub release.

Quick start

@import '@npmegar/rotulo';

body {
    font-family: 'Rotulo', system-ui, sans-serif;
    font-weight: 200;
}

.reading {
    font-family: 'Rotulo Lectura', 'Rotulo', sans-serif;
}

python -m rotulo --out build --web build/web

Fonts

Color details

Dots, accents, the zero slash and punctuation sit on a color layer (COLR/CPAL). The body takes the text color; the detail takes the palette color. Renderers without color fonts draw the whole letter in the text color.

Override the detail color with @font-palette-values and override-colors: 0 <color>.

Reading forms

ss01 switches four letters to the forms of Lectura: l with a tail, q with a crossed tail, a curved flag on 1 and a straight 9.

.labels {
    font-feature-settings: 'ss01';
}

Using the fonts outside the web

Parameters

Params holds every design decision, in units of a 1000 em:

from dataclasses import replace
from pathlib import Path

from rotulo import DISPLAY, build_font

print(build_font(replace(DISPLAY, weight=50), "Medium", 400, Path("build")))

Known limitations

• Latin script: Spanish, Portuguese, French and Catalan, figures and common symbols.
• The variable font keeps overlapping strokes and is not hinted; use the static files at small sizes on Windows.
• Detail colors need COLR support. Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Windows render them; older renderers draw one color.

Development

python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest
ruff check src tests && ruff format --check src tests
mypy

The tests build every font and check heights against the skeleton, kerning, color layers, ss01, hinting and that the variable font interpolates every glyph.

Contributing

Issues are welcome. Please open one before sending a pull request.

License

OFL-1.1 © GHEgar