Squared curves and straight cuts, in four members.
Katagami Sans is a sans serif for interfaces. Katagami Round has geometric bowls and rounded vertices. Katagami Text is the reading member, smaller and softer. Katagami Mono is the monospace for code and terminals. All four share one skeleton: level cuts on c, e, s and a, a g tail that mirrors its bowl, and y and t tails that end in vertical cuts.
katagami (n.) a Japanese paper stencil, cut by hand, used to print patterns on cloth.
Katagami
Katagami (型紙, “pattern paper”) are stencils for dyeing cloth, cut in Shiroko and Jike in Suzuka, Mie, for more than five hundred years. Sheets of washi are bonded with kakishibu, a fermented persimmon tannin that turns them brown and tough. A cutter carves the pattern through the layers, and a fine silk net holds the loose pieces in place. Rice paste goes through the holes, the cloth is dyed, and the paste washes out to leave the pattern white. Type a word to cut it, then dye the cloth.
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. Katagami 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 |
| Katagami | 0.73–0.74 | 2.7–2.8 | Counters move 1.25 times as far, so corners keep their weight |
Katagami 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 katagami is a paper stencil for dyeing cloth. Cutters carved the pattern by hand through several sheets at once, and one stencil could repeat a design down a whole bolt of fabric. Typefaces are cut too, from older shapes, and each recut leaves its own mark.
Katagami keeps Inter's spacing and language coverage so it reads at text sizes. The squared bowls show up from about 24 pixels.
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Katagami Round
The geometric member. It keeps Inter's proportions, spacing and weights, squares its bowls a little less than Katagami Sans, and rounds every outer vertex: stem ends, terminals and apexes. Katagami's figures, the compact f, a G with a spur and level cuts on c, e, s, a and g. Nine weights from Thin to Black.
Katagami Round is built for the places where a typeface should not be noticed first: dashboards, settings pages, long documents and the labels on buttons. It keeps Inter's coverage and features, and its weights line up with Katagami Sans.
Its bowls sit between Inter and Katagami Sans, and its corners are rounded at a fifth of a stem, so it reads as geometric and soft at once.
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Katagami Text
The reading member. Its x-height is 0.71 of the cap height (Inter's is 0.75), every glyph is 4 percent smaller on the same line height, the spacing is tighter, and round letters and capitals are wider. Nine weights from Thin to Black, with the heavy weights lighter than Inter's.
A katagami is a paper stencil for dyeing cloth. Cutters carved the pattern by hand through several sheets at once, and one stencil could repeat a design down a whole bolt of fabric. Typefaces are cut too, from older shapes, and each recut leaves its own mark.
The f is compact, the l has a tail, and the top of the t is cut at a slant. The a has a straight stem and its arch is cut level, as are c, e, s and g. O and Q are 5 percent wider than Inter's, H 4 percent. Its 1 has a long flag and its G has a spur.
Weight 700 in Katagami Text is Inter's 640, and 800 is Inter's 760.
Katagami Mono
Katagami Sans fitted to a cell 1280 units wide, 0.625 em. Letters fill the cell evenly with their stems held, m and w run nearly edge to edge, f, t and r reach out on their arms, and every character that could be mistaken for another has its own shape. Code ligatures for -> => != == and >= are opt-in through dlig, and every character keeps its own cell. 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.
Try Katagami Sans
Type anything. The lines above are editable too, and each member keeps its own edits and settings when you switch. Every OpenType feature in the panel is live.
Glyphs
Every character in each member, 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.
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 2
- Opt-in code ligatures for the mono
- Italics
- Hinting and fontbakery checks
- Greek and Cyrillic in the mono