Understanding variable fonts

Up to this point, we’ve seen a lot of hidden font options that replaced certain glyphs in the font with alternate ones, but there is a class of font that lets you change many more aspects of the letter geometry.

Let’s look at one of the more interesting ones: Decovar24 (see https://v-fonts.com/fonts/decovar for more information and download links for this font). Figure 7.29 shows what tweaking some of the many variable font sliders, which appear at the bottom of the Font tab of the Text and Font dialog, can do:

Figure 7.29 – Changing some of the variable font sliders dramatically changes the look

At the time of writing, there are still only a hundred or so good variable fonts. As adoption increases for variable fonts in other graphics applications, you can expect to see more options. Many have a basic set of options such as sliders for tilt, character width, boldness, or thinness, and I encourage you...