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Traditionally, the single storey a is the default a in Italic typefaces. Because of the nature of variable fonts, it’s not possible to use a single storey a and a double story a, so we give you the option of changing the a in whatever circumstance you like, Italic, Roman… entirely your call.

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This was actually the original way Appalachia was drawn, but when doing readability tests we found that it was not quite as readable as we would have liked. However, when laying out headings in lowercase we liked the way it looked, so we wanted to include it as an option.

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Cards on the table, we couldn’t figure out which Q we liked better. Uppercase Q is typically a character where a font can express it’s individuality, but the protruding line from this stylistic set can look a little odd in some settings so we opted for the more reserved option in the base character set.

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This is an older way of writing a percent or permill symbol that is particularly common on typewriters from before the 1940s. The division slash is of course typically written as a diagonal stroke, but during development we became fascinated by trying to make fractions (including custom fractions) written with a horizontal slash. We’re still working on the custom fractions part of this, determining how long the horizontal slash needs to be has been giving us some trouble. If and when we figure out how, we'll add it to the font software as a free update.

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Broad strokes: the Council for German Orthography officially added a capital form of the letter ß in 2017, but they didn’t release guidelines on how to design it. Many fonts use essentially the same character with a 90 degree angle thrown in, which doesn’t feel quite different enough to us. The ß included as the base character in Appalachia was inspired by street signs in Berlin, whereas the alternate is meant to be more reminiscent of what we typically consider to be an ß.

You can read more about this here.

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We debated internally about calling this stylistic set “spineless,” but thought that was a little too mean. This set replaces the g, j, q, and y characters with forms without a curl, making the font look much more like every other font currently installed on your computer.

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Vertically centers certain characters between the baseline and cap-height. There are very few circumstances where this is necessary, but it’s nice to not have to do it manually when the need arises. Plus we thought (quite correctly) that they’d make for fun emoticons. ◼

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Turning this feature on automatically converts any base-ten number next to a slash next to another base-ten number into a numerator next to a fraction slash next to a denominator. If you want to have a number preceding the fraction, be sure to wrap only the numbers you want converted in a <span> tag, otherwise the font will try to convert all numbers and slashes into fractions. For example: <span>11/3</span> would become 11/3 whereas 1<span>1/3</span> would become 11/3.