Design Regression is a journalette (mini journal) publishing texts that are about design for reading and reading-related research. It aims for the hard-to-get blend of approachability with seriousness and relevance to practice.

Hyperglot helps type designers answer a seemingly simple question of language support in fonts: When can I use font A to set texts in language B? It takes a pragmatic answer by identifying a standard character set for each orthography used by a language.

Hyperglot is a webapp and an open-sourced project available as a command-line tool, Python package, and database.

Typesetting multilingual documents requires a lot of planning. Does the font we want to use support the languages we need? If it does, does it represent all the languages equally well? Which translations will it cause to run long, and which will it cut short? Does the situation change if we decide to use another font, or another size? Will this column width suffice for a language with long words, like Finnish? And what about that line height? Does it account for the frequent diacritics used in languages like Czech or Hungarian?

With the Universal Specimen, we wanted to make some of these questions easier to answer. The specimen/app allows you to easily typeset translations of the same text side by side. It lets you directly preview the effect of common typographic parameters on the appearance and economy (text length) of a specific language.