A font behind the font

One line of statuses set twice: in a house font alone, where the marks it has no glyph for come out as empty boxes, then with a second font behind it that draws them.

A company font rarely has a drawing for every character a document needs. A tick, a star, an umbrella: the font simply does not carry them, and where a drawing is missing the reader gets an empty box and has to guess. This page sets the same line twice, first in the company font on its own, where three of the four marks come out empty, then with a second font standing behind it.

Behind means exactly that: the company font draws everything it can, and each character it cannot goes to the next font. The line ends up drawn in two fonts, and the small list at the foot of the page says which font drew which mark. The height of the line does not move: it stays the first font's, so a page never changes its rhythm because of one symbol.

What this example shows

• A first font asked for everything, a second for what it lacks.
• Every character measured in the font that draws it.
• Line height kept the first font's, whatever the text holds.

The code, in full

The same document is written twice, once in each language. Both files are shown in full, with the code coloured on the server, and can be copied in one click.

The document itself

The same document is written in each of these languages. Open the one you want to look at.

Open the document in English Open the document in French

Read the Rust source Read the Python source

What this document weighs

This document weighs 58,783 bytes.

The team wrote this example after measuring the documents above, so there is no earlier figure to set beside it. See every document measured.