Adding the Libre Franklin variable web font

For just about all of this site’s four-plus-year history, its typographical presentation has taken one of three forms:

• The “system fonts stack.”
• The variable form of the Inter web font.
• The variable form of the Public Sans web font.

I’ve long admired Public Sans, largely because of its similarity to the historic Franklin Gothic typeface, of which I’ve been a fan since at least the 1970s. Also, I like how Public Sans handles italicized/oblique text, which — given my writing style and tendency toward emphasizing things willy-nilly — makes for easier reading.

However, there’s a long-standing (and not-soon-to-be-fixed¹) issue with Public Sans regarding excessive padding around its em dash character. For a few weeks, I compensated for it with some coding, such as the following in Hugo:

{{- $Content := .Content -}}
{{- if .Site.Params.PublicSans -}}
	{{- $Content = replace .Content " — " "—" -}}
	{{- if in $Content "—" -}}
		{{- $Content = replace .Content " — " "—" -}}
	{{- end -}}{{- /* Ulysses files */ -}}
	{{- /* Due to Public Sans bug */ -}}
{{- end -}}
{{ $Content | safeHTML }}

. . . but finally decided I simply needed to try a different font rather than continuing to jump through such hoops.

The most logical choice for a Public Sans replacement was the font from which it was forked in the first place: Libre Franklin. Here’s a graphic which shows some of the subtle differences between the two:

Image: the Public Sans repo.

The problem came whenever I’d try to use the variable fonts from the Libre Franklin repo. For reasons of which I’m presently unaware, they’d always come in looking extra-bold, regardless of what CSS I applied.

Consequently, I ended up going to that source about which I’ve previously warned you: Google Fonts. Its own copies of Libre Franklin’s variable versions turned out to be fine. Of course, I followed my own advice and just downloaded the font files for serving from here, thus avoiding the privacy-violating aspects of using Google Fonts when served from Google.

If you, too, have been buffaloed in trying to use the repo-based versions of Libre Franklin’s variable font files, I hope this will point you to a better solution.