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About Patens

Pa·tens · Latin: lying open, wide open, accessible · pronunciation

Patens is a type editor with a method. Ninety-four rules check your work as you draw it, and each one ships with a paragraph explaining what's wrong and how the foundries solve it. The audit is the product. The editor is how it's delivered.

Around thirty of the rules also offer a one-click fix. The rest are matters of judgment — the kind of judgment type designers internalize through years of mentorship. Patens tries to be the mentor in the room. Not louder than the work, just there.

Underneath: a pressure-sensitive sketch tool, curve-fit trace to cubic Bézier, anchor-level editing, kerning with classes, variable fonts, color fonts, OpenType features, and a real OTF / WOFF2 / TTF / UFO export pipeline. The whole thing runs in a tab — no install, no account, no telemetry. Projects live in your browser's IndexedDB. Nothing leaves the machine unless you choose to share. MIT-licensed, works offline as a PWA.

The name is the Latin word for open — root of patent, the legal instrument for owning ideas. Patens is the same word, before lawyers got to it.

The shape of the bet: a tool designers can actually keep open in a tab next to their work, that hands them a real OTF at the end. Not a FontLab replacement. Not a multi-user collaborative editor. A single-designer, single-machine, share-friendly workshop.

How to say it

PAH-tens — stress on the first syllable, short a like father, soft e like tens. In IPA: /ˈpɑː.tɛns/.

Not PAT-ens (the English plural of paten, the liturgical plate). The word is Latin and the Latin pronunciation is what we mean.

Maintainer

Built and maintained by Alejandro Vizio . Open source under the MIT License . Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md .

x.com/@patenstype bsky/@patens.design instagram/@patens.type hi@patens.design

Standing on

Patens is small code on top of large ideas. The pieces that did the heavy lifting:

  • SvelteKit · The application framework.
  • Svelte 5 · Reactivity via runes (`$state`, `$derived`, `$effect`).
  • Tailwind CSS v4 · Utility-first styling. Tokens via CSS custom properties.
  • opentype.js · OTF + WOFF2 read/write in the browser.
  • Pyodide + fontTools + ttfautohint · TTF export pipeline. Runs as WebAssembly so no server is needed.
  • HarfBuzz.js · OpenType shaping for the live preview.
  • fit-curve · Schneider curve-fitting for the sketch → vector trace path.
  • idb-keyval · Tiny IndexedDB wrapper. Stores every project locally.
  • polygon-clipping · Boolean ops on contours (union, difference) for the trace step.
  • perfect-freehand · Pressure-sensitive sketch path computation.
  • satori + resvg-js · Server-rendered OG images via JSX → SVG → PNG.
  • Vercel Blob · Cloud storage for cross-browser share links.
  • Vercel · Deploys + edge CDN.

Status

v1.5.2, production-grade. Full changelog →

What's deferred to a future arc lives in ROADMAP.md — most notably a real drawn Italic master, bespoke Cyrillic + Greek shapes, and a proper account system.