samsa

Tech stack & purpose

Samsa is a web app for visualizing and inspecting variable fonts, enabling type designers, font developers, and front-end developers to explore how variable fonts work by opening font files, examining glyph outlines, and navigating the design space using interactive sliders and controls. The project is built in ES6 JavaScript with no external dependencies and consists of multiple components: the main Samsa-GUI web application, Samsa-Core (a JavaScript library implementing much of the OpenType 1.8 Variations specification), Samsa-CLI (a Node.js-based command-line utility for generating static font instances), and Samsa-Polyfill (a browser polyfill). The project grew out of earlier work on a TTF outline editor and variable font browser polyfill, received support from Google Fonts in 2019, and is released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Community & reference links

• Gregor Samsa
• [video
• Detailed video presentation May 2020 (90 mins)

Languages

Contributors

• Lorp362 commits
• Laurence Penney52 commits
• lorp37 commits
• Wenting Zhang13 commits
• Leonard Bogdonoff4 commits
• cadars3 commits
• Matt Lenz2 commits