All good things come in threes: The last day of TYPO Labs has offered insights into CJK Fonts, educational perspectives and future scenarios concering the broad implementation of Variable Fonts. In this newsletter we sum up some of the highlights for you.

We would like to thank all of the speakers, participants, helpers, sponsors and attendees who made the last three days an inspiring, clever, funny and memorable event.

Thanks to all and see you next year,
Your TYPO Labs Team

Google Fonts delivers free, open source, fonts to billions of pages across the web. In recent years quality and support for a range of languages improved considerably but still missing was support for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK).

“On the web, you can render Latin texts with just a few hundred characters. To render Korean you need an enormous number ... more like 17,000 for complete coverage” explains Rod Sheeter. Together with Garret Rieger he showed solutions to intelligently partition fonts to minimize transfer size, number of requests, and latency and optimize cross-site caching when delivering Korean fonts.

#howlongcanwego? Join us tonight at 10 pm for the #typolabs18 closing party with drinks & snacks at Mama Bar! No rsvp needed, just bring your TYPO Labs badge. 

Mama Bar
Hobrechtstraße 61
12047 Berlin

Shortly before the lunch break Minjoo Ham gave a talk that was quite mouthwatering. She taught us how to write Bibimbap – one of the most traditional Korean dishes – in Hangul and explained how to build brigdes between Latin and Korean fonts. 

“You have to mix rational tools like TypeCooker with conceptual methods in creating Korean fonts based on latin: Extract the rational part of the recipe and then combine it with the conceptual side of the font” explained Minjoo her way of working when transfering Latin script into her mother tongue.

Code. Code. Code. Dominik Röttsches and Behdad Esfahbod gave us an update on Chrome Typography and FontTools. Dominik presented recent enhancements in Chrome related to the way text and emoji are rendered across platforms. He took a moment to focus on the recent return of a long lost feature of text on the web: ink-skipping underlines. Behdad dove even further into technical matters and gave a preview of new libraries to render Variable Fonts.

Join us for TYPO Berlin »Trigger« May 17–19 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. There are only a few tickets left. Register here.