Samsa (Variable Fonts JS inspector engine + UI) presentation by Laurence Penney (Axis Praxis)
Channel: Dave Crossland
Date: 2020-05-13

Samsa is a web-based tool for visualizing what happens inside variable fonts, written in vanilla JavaScript with no dependencies. For audiences of web typographers, font-makers, VF implementors and others, Samsa helps to explain multi-dimensional designspaces, intermediate masters, tuples, delta scaling & aggregation, axis normalization, IUP compression, the STAT and avar tables, and other terms and techniques of variable fonts.

GitHub repository
https://github.com/Lorp/samsa

Try Samsa now:
https://lorp.github.io/samsa

During this workshop Laurence explains how Samsa works and how to customize it, how Samsa can help with variable font development, and how you can export SVG graphics. We’ll also look at the command-line utility that uses the same core library, that generates static instances from variable fonts. Q&A open for type designers and engineers to discuss use of Samsa including feature requests.

Samsa is released as open-source (Apache 2.0 license).

The videoconference took place May 8 2020, as a replacement for the workshop planned for TypeTech Munich.