wavefont

A typeface for rendering data: waveforms, spectrums, diagrams, bars etc.

Playground  •  Google fonts  •  V-fonts  •   Wavearea

Usage

Place wavefont.woff2 into your project directory and use this code:

<style>
@font-face {
	font-family: wavefont;
	font-display: block;
	src: url(./wavefont.woff2) format('woff2');
}
.wavefont {
	--wght: 10;
	font-family: wavefont;
	font-variation-settings: 'wght' var(--wght), 'ROND' 30, 'YELA' 0;
}
</style>

<!-- Set values manually -->
<textarea id="waveform" class="wavefont" cols="100">
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
</textarea>

<script>
// Set values programmatically (more precise)
waveform.textContent = Array.from({length: 100}, (_,i) => String.fromCharCode(0x100 + i)).join('')
</script>

Ranges

Wavefont bars correspond to values from 0 to 100, assigned to different characters:

• 0-9 chars are for simplified manual input with step 10 (bar height = number).
• a-zA-Z for manual input with step 2, softened at edges a and Z (bar height = number of letter).
• U+0100-017F for 0..127 values with step 1 (char = String.fromCharCode(0x100 + value)).

Variable axes

To adjust axes via CSS:

.wavefont {
  font-variation-settings: 'wght' var(--wght, 40), 'ROND' var(--rond, 0), 'YELA' var(--align, 0);
  letter-spacing: 1ch; /* 1ch unit === 1 bar width */
}

Features

• Visible charcodes fall under marking characters unicode category, ie. recognized as word by regexp and can be selected with Ctrl + → or double click. Eg. waveform segments separated by or - are selectable by double click.
• Characters outside of visible ranges are clipped to 0, eg. , \t etc.
• -–._* map to 1 value, | maps to max value, ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ map to corresponding bars.
• Accent acute  ́ (U+0301) shifts bar 1-step up, circumflex accent  ̂ (U+0302) 10-steps up. Eg. \u0101\u0302\u0302\u0301\u0301\u0301 shifts 23 steps up.
• Accent grave  ̀ (U+0300) shifts bar 1-step down, caron  ̌ (U+030C) shifts 10 steps down, eg. \u0101\u030c\u0300\u0300\u0300 shifts 13 steps down.
• Caret span is -20..120, so line-height = 1.4 is minimal non-overlapping selection.

JS package

To facilitate calculation, wavefont exposes a function that calculates string from values.

import wf from 'wavefont'

// get characters for values from 0..127 range
wf(0, 1, 50, 99, 127, ...) // ĀāIJţŤ...

Building

make build

• Tests
• Glyphs
• Text
• Waterfall

See also

• linefont − font-face for rendering linear data.

References

• Google Fonts guide.
• Unified font object spec − unified human-readable format for storing font data.
• Feature file spec − defining opentype font features.
• Unicode-table − convenient unicode table.
• Adobe-variable-font-prototype − example variable font.
• Designspace XML spec − human-readable format for describing variable fonts.
• Adobe Blank − blank characters variable font.

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