Mellow Italic

Mellow Italic's lowercase x reaches 71.5% of the capital height, close to the 69.6% median for serif fonts, taller than 26 of the 39 other serif fonts. Ascenders on b, d, h, k and l line up with the capitals (100% of their height), and descenders on g, j, p, q and y drop 28.8% of the cap height below the baseline, shallower than 21 of the 39 other serif fonts. Mellow Italic runs 9.3% wider than the median for serif fonts: an average lowercase letter, spacing included, is 93.9% as wide as the capitals are tall (an average capital, 107.9%). The o is close to a circle, 1.13 times as wide as it is tall, and M is the widest capital, at 1.04 times the width of H. The O rises 1% of the cap height above H and sits on the baseline.

Vertical stems measure 19.4% of the cap height, heavier than 27 of the 35 other serif fonts. Ink covers 41.3% of each lowercase letter's box (its advance width by the cap height), darker than 31 of the 39 other serif fonts. The contrast is mild: the sides of o and O are 1.27 times as thick as their tops and bottoms.

Its 501 characters include 105 Latin, 73 Thai, 69 Greek, 67 Devanagari, 66 Cyrillic, 36 Arabic and 27 Hebrew letters, plus 58 figures, punctuation marks and symbols; 53 of the Latin letters are accented or special forms beyond A to Z. The word space measures 36.3% of the cap height, and the blank space either side of a lowercase letter takes up 6.8% of its width. Spacing is adjusted with 150 kerning pairs, more than 20 of the 39 other serif fonts. The tightest of them is VA, which closes up by 29.5% of the cap height. Its OpenType tables also hold Arabic joining forms (init, medi, fina), Devanagari conjuncts and vowel signs (half, rphf, blwf and more), mark positioning for accents and vowel signs (mark, mkmk), ligatures (liga, dlig) and glyph composition (ccmp, locl). The figures have different widths, so columns of numbers set in Mellow Italic will not line up exactly.

5 other library fonts share Mellow Italic's underlying letter structure. Compared with Mellow Italic, Elven Serif sets 11% narrower and puts down 42% less ink. Lounge Inline cuts a thin line along each stroke. Peace Outline draws the letters as hollow outlines and puts down 67% less ink.