Octopus is font or typeface design testing tool for static and variable fonts, that runs locally in your web browser. Initially created by Viktoriya Grabowska and Szymon Marciniak, it became a public libre software project in 2024 thanks to financial support from Google Fonts. Special thanks to Eben Sorkin and Dave Crossland for making this happen.
Octopus was made to test fonts with large design spaces more efficiently. It offer up to six different views of a variable font, all at the same time. It also allows you choose your views on or in-between masters.
Octopus is useful as a QA tool, as looking in-between masters can catch inconsistencies in your letterforms or spacing, especially interpolation problems.
Octopus is also useful for comparing your design to other designs, your roman to your italic, and so on.
Octopus can use premade texts to test into. A growing body of sample texts are available from github.com/SorkinType/octo-text
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Download this repo, then make project specific copies as their own folders (or git branches), and then open the index.html file in your preferred browser. (On macOS, you can even make the copies in your
/Applicationsfolder, if you want.) -
Then, make copies of the fonts you want to test in the /fonts folder of the tool. Octopus does not see installed fonts on your computer.
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Then make copies of test texts in the [/assets/_testing texts](assets/_testing texts) folder, for convenience and archival, or you can load them temporarily from any other location on your computer.
Refresh your browser page, or even quit the browser and restart it.
Q: Does Octopus run on any version, flavor or variety of system (macOS, GNU+Linux, Windows, iOS, Android)?
As a web app, it will work on any system - Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari.