Newsreader (opt-in)

Self-hosted, upright variable Newsreader for reading text. The WOFF2 retains wght 200–800 and opsz 6–72, with only the Latin / Latin Extended Unicode ranges listed in fonts.css. Italic is not included.

Source: google/fonts, ofl/newsreader, commit 8b0a1d0f5983c89bc2b93f1b5fb55f9e252744b5 (2026-03-12). Upstream: productiontype/NewsReader, commit 1ece6a8bfe5db1a2b90c76cc1fe5d3b2eed5dcf3, as recorded in METADATA.pb. The source Newsreader[opsz,wght].ttf SHA-256 is 8a08d13f8a6c0d51be379a60af84f945f65369a67e509ee3c3bdcc421254d7c1.

Licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; OFL.txt is copied verbatim from the source. No Reserved Font Name is declared in that file. Copyright 2020 The Newsreader Project Authors. Keep the licence with redistributed copies.

Use

Link the stylesheet separately from jaack.css. It is never imported by components/reading.css; sites choose whether to load it. Paths are relative to the site’s existing vendor directory:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/vendor/jaack-design/jaack.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/vendor/jaack-design/fonts/newsreader/fonts.css">
<!-- Optional: preload the same URL resolved by fonts.css. -->
<link rel="preload" href="/vendor/jaack-design/fonts/newsreader/Newsreader-roman.woff2"
      as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin>

.jk-prose uses --jk-font-read, including the metric-adjusted Iowan and Georgia local fallback faces defined here. Fonts use font-display:swap. Only the Newsreader WOFF2 is distributed; system fallback fonts stay local.

Rebuild

Requires Python with fontTools and brotli, the pyftsubset executable, and the macOS fallback fonts below. No download runs. From the repository root:

tools/build-fonts.sh '/path/to/Newsreader[opsz,wght].ttf'

Set PYTHON and PYFTSUBSET to executables in your environment if needed. The exact subset command run by the script (with $source_font pointing at the provided TTF) is:

pyftsubset "$source_font" \
  --output-file=fonts/newsreader/Newsreader-roman.woff2 \
  --unicodes="U+0000-00FF,U+0100-024F,U+0259,U+1E00-1EFF,U+2000-206F,U+20A0-20CF,U+2100-214F,U+2190-21FF,U+2212,U+2215,U+FEFF,U+FFFD" \
  --layout-features='*' --flavor=woff2 --no-hinting \
  --name-IDs='*' --name-languages='*' --no-recalc-timestamp

The script also regenerates fonts.css. It uses fontTools to instantiate the source at wght=400 and its actual fvar default opsz=18 (the metadata registry override of 16 does not change that default). The weighted sample uses standard English a–z frequencies, normalized to 81.82% of the sample, plus 18.18% space; the full frequency table and raw calculated numbers are in the generated CSS. It averages hmtx advances, normalized by each font’s unitsPerEm, without kerning.

Fallback inputs are /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/Iowan Old Style.ttc (the IowanOldStyle-Roman face) and /System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/Georgia.ttf. Their metrics are read from the real files; no guessed metrics are used. The formulas are:

size-adjust = normalized Newsreader average / normalized fallback average
ascent-override = Newsreader hhea.ascent / (unitsPerEm × size-adjust)
descent-override = abs(Newsreader hhea.descent) / (unitsPerEm × size-adjust)
line-gap-override = Newsreader hhea.lineGap / (unitsPerEm × size-adjust)

CSS percentages round to two decimals. Rebuilding metrics needs these same system font versions; it is separate from the ordinary cross-platform bundle build. The packaged WOFF2 is 207,040 bytes with the supplied source and toolchain.