News

Localized forms

Modern font files are much more than just a collection of fancy glyphs. Advanced OpenType features give the ability to change specific glyphs into alternates, swashes, ligatures, small caps etc. to make a design of your own. One of these typographic features is called ‘Localized Forms’ which allows a font to show a localized variant form of certain characters based on the text language.

For example the Cyrillic letter De (д) has multiple forms, where the variant that resembles the triangular shape of the Greek letter delta may be used in Bulgarian and Serbian. Or the Latin letter S with cedilla (ş) which can be displayed as an S with comma in Romanian.

Now you can preview these in Typeface by choosing a language from the Typography > Language menu. Fonts that support localized forms will show the glyph variants for the selected language.

This feature works because a font may define a different set of OpenType features for specific scripts and languages. You can browse these different sets in the Features detail tab using the new script selector.

Additionally, the family style list has been enhanced with automatically grouped related styles. This is particularly useful if you have duplicate fonts from different foundries or fonts that come in multiple formats (web fonts, desktop fonts).

These styles are now neatly organized in separate sections in the detail view, such that you can localize and activate exactly the ones you need. And the new auto resizing columns ensure all meta data is visible in the family style list.

Enjoy!

Pairing Fonts

After many iterations and prototypes I’m proud to introduce a brand new Typeface module: Pairing Studio. This new panel allows you to mix and match multiple fonts in text layouts, with a fresh interface fully dedicated to font combinations and iterative designing.

Pair exquisite display fonts to grab attention with clear text fonts that prioritize legibility for body copy. Pick a family with multiple weights and create a satisfying hierarchy of styles. Or just play around for fun and see what sticks.

Zero AI - only your creativity. Learn more about pairing fonts

Enjoy!

Restoring Activated Fonts

Fonts manually activated using Typeface should stay activated until explicitly deactivated, even after restarting your Mac. Your activated fonts will therefore stay available in your design apps.

However, Typeface does not prevent other applications from activating or deactivating fonts. External (de)activations are respected and the font activation status is updated accordingly in your library. This makes sure that the app doesn’t fight you or other apps — for example when you manually activate fonts using Font Book, or when Adobe Fonts updates the synced fonts on your Mac. These changes should not be reverted automatically, because they are deliberate actions.

But sometimes deactivations are not deliberately made by you and you may find that your activated fonts are suddenly not available anymore. This may for example happen when macOS is updated to a newer version. During the update process the system may clear the macOS font cache, which results in deactivation of your fonts.

Now Typeface can detect those deactivations at launch and allows you to easily restore the activated fonts. You can choose to reactivate them, or leave them deactivated — you stay in charge.

Backups

In addition to detecting deactivated fonts at launch you can also restore activated fonts at any time from a backup. Tag backups contain information about your activations and you can optionally restore them when importing a backup.

The new Backup section in Settings allows you to view and restore the automatic backups Typeface creates when you close the app. So whenever you notice fonts were deactivated without your consent, you’ll be up and running again quickly by restoring them from a backup.

Enjoy!