How are you feeling?
Four things you can measure about any font
- 📏 X-height. The height of the lowercase body — the real “how big does it feel.” At the same point size, the taller x-height reads bigger.
- ↔️ Kerning. The gap between two particular letters. Shapes like AV and To lean apart and need tucking closer; most pairs are fine as-is.
- 🖊️ Stroke contrast. Thick-to-thin ratio. Low contrast stays legible tiny; high contrast is elegant huge but its hairlines vanish at caption size.
- 🇻🇳 Stacked capitals. French “É” carries one mark; Vietnamese “Ễ” stacks two. Set two lines of Vietnamese capitals too tightly and the marks crash into the line above.
For grown-ups — what TypeForge teaches, and how
What it is. A typography lab for ages 9–14. Children set their own words in three real fonts, measure an x-height with a ruler, kern a pair by hand, shrink type until its thin strokes fade, and watch Vietnamese capitals crash and clear as the line spacing opens.
Where the numbers come from. The x-height, cap height and ascender are read from the font files (OS/2 and hhea tables), and a test re-reads them so they can't drift. Kerning, stroke contrast and the height of a stacked capital are measured by setting each font in a browser.
What to try together. Go type hunting: a shop sign with tight kerning, a menu in tiny thin-stroked type, a Vietnamese menu with stacked marks. Or write your name in pencil, marker and brush pen and compare the thick and thin strokes.
Privacy. Typed words stay on the page. Nothing is sent and nothing is saved, and there is no score.
Honest yield. An eye for how letters are built and why a font can fail a language. It is not a design-skill test.
Meet the crew — the anatomy of a letter
Ex is the x-height — the lowercase body everyone actually reads, and the truest measure of how big a font feels.
Kern is the spacer who tucks the awkward pairs closer so a word reads as one smooth run, not a string of gaps.
Hairline is the thin stroke that looks elegant on a poster and disappears in a caption — the warning about high contrast.
Headroom is the quiet space above the capitals where the accents live, and the reason a font can break Vietnamese.
Serif (mentor) is the old type-cutter who reminds the crew that a font is never simply good — it’s good at a size, for a language, for a job.
Serif’s story: how Vietnamese came to Latin letters
For hundreds of years, formal writing in Vietnam was in Classical Chinese, and the Vietnamese language itself was written in chữ Nôm, characters made for Vietnamese words. In the early 1600s, Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, working with Vietnamese helpers, began to spell Vietnamese with Latin letters and added marks for its sounds.
In 1651 the French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes printed a Vietnamese, Portuguese and Latin dictionary in Rome. Here is one of its entries. Look for the little hooks on ơ and ư, and a letter wearing two marks at once.
The spelling kept changing for another 250 years. In the twentieth century chữ Quốc ngữ, “the national script”, became the way Vietnamese is written every day.
Why the stacked marks? Northern Vietnamese has six tones: the same syllable said six ways makes six different words (ma, má, mà, mả, mã, mạ). So a letter can carry a tone mark, and some vowels have a mark of their own (â, ê, ô, ơ, ư, ă). One letter can wear both, like ễ. That is the headroom Headroom measures.
😄 Brain break
What next? Pick a door
- More like this CraftForge How would a painter mix this colour? WorldForge Can Beam fly through your maze? QuestForge Who is in range of this spell?
- A bit harder LevelForge Is every jump in this level fair? FeelDojo Does this answer you, or bait you? HueForge Which colour pairing reads clearest?
- Something different CaptionQuest Can you take over the reading? SortTales Which sort is fastest for this list? StageForge Where should this actor stand?