Plootarch

Plootarch is the typeface this site is set in. It started as a question about tooling, not about letters: what if the rounding of a typeface were a parameter instead of a month of manual work?

Where it comes from

Plootarch is a derivative of Schibsted Grotesk 1.100, released under the SIL Open Font License. Only the outlines were changed. Advance widths, kerning, vertical metrics and OpenType features are those of the original, so a text set in Plootarch takes exactly the same space as the same text in Schibsted Grotesk.

What changed

• Every corner where two strokes meet is filleted with a large radius. Every stroke end gets a tiny one. Corners inside counters get the largest of all.
• The crossbars of A, H, E and F sit lower. On the A the bar widens as it drops, so the legs stay straight.
• The leg of the R springs from under the bowl instead of from its right edge.
• The round tittles and dieresis dots of i, j, ä, ö and ü are rounded squares whose size is tied to the stem width.
• The ligatures ff, fi and fl are not redrawn. The letters are pushed together until they touch, unioned, and the seam is rounded by the same fillet as every other joint.

How it is built

The work is done by Molten, a Python pipeline on top of fontTools, ufoLib2 and fontmake. It opens the source font, applies the shape edits, finds and classifies every stroke terminal, replaces each corner with a circular fillet whose radius depends on the corner's type, and compiles OTF, TTF and WOFF2 with licence and modification notice attached.

Radii are measured in stem widths, not in units, so the same settings produce the same feel across weights and sources. Three settings ship as their own families: Plootarch Sharp, Plootarch and Plootarch Fused. The same pipeline has also turned Inter Display into a second family, Molten.

Styles

Medium and Medium Italic, 123 glyphs each: basic Latin, German umlauts and ß, the usual punctuation, € and the ligatures. Enough for this site, and for the next brand that needs a grotesk with softer manners.