About these specimens

This is the specimen section of Avrenela, which is otherwise a notebook about setting text. It was split onto its own subdomain for the dull reason that specimen pages want a wider column than the notes do, and maintaining two measures in one stylesheet was more annoying than maintaining two sites.

Why nothing is downloaded

Every face shown here is one your system already has. That is the whole premise: a specimen is only useful if it tells you what your readers will see, and a specimen that ships its own font tells you what the specimen's author saw. Those are different questions, and the second one is the less interesting.

It follows that these pages will not look identical on two machines, and that is the intended behaviour rather than a defect. If a face is missing, the stack falls through and you are looking at the fallback — which is precisely the outcome you would get in production and precisely the thing worth knowing before you ship it.

What the samples show

Each page carries a waterfall, a character set with the pairs that are actually confusable in that face, and the same paragraph set three times at 14, 17 and 20 pixels. The repetition is the point. A face is not legible or illegible in the abstract; it is legible at some sizes and not at others, and reading the same sentence three times down a page is the fastest way to find the boundary.

Where a claim is measurable it is stated as measurable. Where it is taste it is labelled as taste. Comparative widths are given as rough percentages because the exact figure depends on which digitisation your system resolved to, and pretending otherwise would be false precision.

Colophon

Static HTML and one stylesheet, written by hand, sharing the palette and page furniture with the main site. Body text is Georgia; navigation and captions use the system sans. No web fonts, no JavaScript, no analytics, no cookies, and no request that leaves the page.

The dark palette is a separate set of values rather than a filter over the light one, for the reasons set out in the note on dark themes on the main site.