Refine quotation marks in Recursive Sans

This release refines the weights of quotation marks in the “Sans” styles of Recursive, especially at lighter weight values.

Previously, these quotation glyphs '"“”‘’„‚ were a relatively heavy weight, adopting the aesthetic of bold punctuation common in monospace fonts (included Recursive Mono). However, the degree of heaviness proved somewhat distracting in text, so this release tones that down a bit to improve readability. Now, quotation marks better match the visual weight of other glyphs. This is most visible at the Light styles (Weight: 300), but also impacts Regular and Medium weights, including Slanted/Italic styles.

Monospace punctuation remains unchanged, as heavy punctuation is useful in fixed-width fonts.

Add mathematical Greek

Adds Greek characters commonly used in mathematics: α β γ μ λ ν θ π δ φ – along with associated uppercase characters Α Β Γ Δ Λ Μ Ν Θ Π Φ – across all styles.

Also slightly refines the numeral 8 in Linear styles, making it a little more sturdy and formal.

Glyph width corrections: Sans minus.superior, Mono fl and fi

A minus.superior sign for exponents/superiors was added in the last release. However, it was too wide in the Sans styles. This release corrects that.

It also adds the ability to substitute the minus.superior for the hyphen rather than only the minus, for easier access.

It also closes #483, by making the fi and fl glyphs only 1 unit wide in the mono. Note that these glyphs aren’t ligatures that are easily accessible or intended for use in code – they are only there for describing the specific Unicode characters 0xFB01 – fi and 0xFB02 - fl.

Make default numbers fully tabular, add fuller pnum feature, and other tiny fixes & upgrades

The main change here is that the default characters for all instances (Sans included) are now fully tabular, for better use in data tables, numerical animations, invoices, and more. They were always intended to be tabular by default, but they were unintentionally given kerning that made them not-quite-tabular. The kerning that was present was useful, so it was moved into a fuller proportional numbers (pnum) feature, and can still be activated for better text flow.

Overall changes:

• Adds a minus.superior glyph, for negative exponents
• Aixes the width of the prebuilt ½ glyph in Sans styles (Closes #479)
• Adds a ratio glyph (Closes #480)
• Adds mu (μ) as a greek character. It was already there under the mu.math Unicode value, but this will make it easier to find and use (Closes #481)
• Fixes not-quite-tabular figures (Closes #482)

Several small fixes to diacritics and kerning

Several small fixes to diacritics and spacing:

• Fixes #472 – Accidental kerning pair in Sans: standard (tabular) 1 and 7
• Fixes #465 – Overly-tight kerning: right quote + e accents
• Fixes #450 – Combining vertical line below had incorrect Unicode value.

UPDATE, Aug 11: This release originally contained version 1.078 fonts in the Recursive_Code folder. They are now the correct version 1.079 fonts.

v1.078 – fix backtick/grave issue

There are two types of accent characters in Unicode: legacy marks like U+0060 (grave) and combining marks like U+0300 (combining grave). In release 1.077, Recursive automatically subbed the legacy marks for combining marks in certain situations. This had certain advantages – e.g. it was a bit easier to type accented characters – but the major disadvantage that the grave (U+0060) character, which is frequently used in code (e.g. in JavaScript for template literals), would combine with characters typed before it.

This release, then, pulls back this feature a bit to make Recursive operate more like other common fonts.

See Issue #456 for further details.

v1.077 – Upgrade 'mark' and 'mkmk' features for mark attachments

Closes #367 by making Ṝ ṝ Ḹ ḹ work well, and does so by upgrading the mark and mkmk features.

UPDATE, March 17: Adds example HTML to woff2 variable subsets, along with subsets for Vietnamese, and for extra-extended Latin characters. See cada0c6 and aa930e9

UPDATE, March 19: A issue in the woff2 subsets was fixed – previously, duplicates in the “remaining glyphs” subset were preventing other subsets from loading, if all subsets were included in CSS. The HTML example accompanying these subsets was also further improved.

v1.075 – Add localization features, make combining marks case-sensitive

This release adds support for several important localization features (locl) for several Latin script languages: Catalonian, Vietnamese, Romanian, Moldovian, and Dutch. It also makes combining marks case-sensitive.

Thanks to @benkiel for his work on these feature additions.

Closes issues #217, #368, and #440. (Work is in progress to solve Issue #367 next!)

v1.074 – Fix inconsistent default line heights on macOS

This release fixes an issue where a few of the styles of Recursive (Linear Medium–ExtraBold) had taller default line heights on macOS in programs like Sketch & Keynote. As before, line heights are compact and vertically-center uppercase letters for easy, ideal centering in UI design elements like buttons, boxes, and icon labels. Previously, a few of the Linear weights would have required adjustments to work as intended, but with this release, all line heights are consistent by default.

Line heights stay the same as they previously were – so, there shouldn’t be any layout changes on the web, and layout changes are only expected (maybe) in documents like Sketch & Keynote documents using Linear Medium–ExtraBold styles.

Technical details: previously, diacritics on uppercase characters for Western European languages exceeded the general “bounding box” (hhea.ascent) in a few styles, which caused macOS to ignore the font metrics and set these with excessive line height.

This release closes #308.

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UPDATE

As a hotfix on Feb 19, 2021, new versions of the Recursive Code fonts have been added which solve a line-height issue in Sublime Text on Windows 10 (#418).

v1.073 – weight-specific underlines, fixed ß

This release includes weight-specific underline & strikethrough sizing. Like a few aspects of Recursive, this design decision is made in part to advocate for fuller support of the OpenType spec by software. These won’t be be rendered by all apps & environments, so think of them as progressive enhancement. For instance, default underline & strikethrough values are shown by Chrome & Safari browsers, but custom sizing will be shown by Firefox. Mac apps that use system rendering (CoreText) support custom underline sizing, but not custom strikeout, while Windows 10 apps like WordPad support custom sizing for both, but not custom positioning.

Things look okay with the default sizing & position chosen by apps, or a little better if apps support the custom design decisions.

A good source covering several places where custom underline & strikeout values work (or don’t work) is a blog post by Harbor Type.

This release also fixes an overlap issue in the ß (uppercase German double S).

Issues closed:

• #285 (custom underline)
• #436 (fixed ß)