Squared curves and straight cuts, in a sans and a mono.
Kerf Sans is a sans serif for interfaces and text. Kerf Mono is its monospace for code and terminals. Both share one skeleton: superellipse bowls, horizontal terminals, square punctuation, and round letters as wide as straight ones.
kerf (n.) the width of material removed by a saw blade or a laser.
Curves
Every quarter arc sits in a box whose corner is where its two tangents meet. The handle fraction f is how far each handle reaches toward that corner. A circle reaches 0.552 of the way. Inter reaches about 0.60. Kerf reaches 0.73 in lowercase and 0.74 in capitals, the same shape measured on Camber.
| Source | Handle fraction f | Superellipse n | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Circle | 0.552 | 2.00 | Reference |
| Inter | 0.60 | 2.16 | Starting outlines |
| Camber | 0.73–0.76 | 2.68–2.84 | Measured from the foundry's webfont |
| Kerf | 0.73–0.74 | 2.7–2.8 | Counters move 1.25 times as far, so corners keep their weight |
Kerf Sans
Inter's spacing, coverage and features, moved toward Camber's geometry. Nine weights from Thin to Black on one variable axis. From SemiBold up it runs heavier than Inter at the same value.
A kerf is the slot a cut leaves behind. Its width depends on the tool: a fine saw blade removes less than a coarse one, and a laser removes less again. Typefaces are cut too, from older shapes, and each recut leaves its own mark.
Kerf keeps Inter's spacing and language coverage so it reads at text sizes. The squared bowls show up from about 24 pixels.
Settings, Billing, Members, Usage, API keys.
Kerf Mono
Kerf Sans fitted to a cell 1232 units wide, 0.6 em. Wide letters are condensed with their stems held, narrow ones are stretched, and every character that could be mistaken for another is given its own shape. Seven weights from Thin to Bold.
Box drawing
All 160 characters from U+2500 to U+259F are generated from their Unicode names. Lines run the full line height, so they join across rows at a line height of 1.21. Rounded corners use the letters' squared curve.
Glyphs
Every character in both fonts, cut into the inside of a cylinder in code point order. Drag to turn, scroll to move between rows, and click a glyph to pull it out of the wall.
Try it
Type anything. Every OpenType feature in the panel is live.
Specs
Values in font units at 2048 units per em. Every number here is a constant in the build scripts and is explained in SPEC.md.
Status
Version 0.1 is generated. Every glyph is the output of a transform on Inter's outlines, and none has been corrected by hand yet.
- Hand corrections: flat-topped t, straight Q tail, squarer 1, 2 and 3
- Opt-in code ligatures for the mono
- Italics
- Hinting and fontbakery checks
- Greek and Cyrillic in the mono