demo · v133
Variable font axes
Move the wght, wdth, and slnt sliders below and watch the same glyph reshape through Fontations, the Rust replacement for FreeType. Variable axis interpolation is one of the trickiest font-stack operations to get right.
Variable
400
100
0
computed font-variation-settings
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render pathHarfBuzz → Fontations (Rust) → Skia
memory-safety surface reduced byHarfBuzz Rust port + Fontations
why the rewrite matters
FreeType's C codebase has parsed adversarial font files in Chrome's renderer for two decades, and almost every other browser. Roughly a third of historical font-parsing CVEs in Chromium were memory safety issues in FreeType paths. Fontations is a from-scratch Rust implementation that ships the same OT/variable-font behaviour with the memory-safety guarantees of the language. Interactive axis interpolation like the demo above is one of the hottest paths through the new code.