Make a cursive q

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A comment on my CSS-Tricks article about Recursive posed an interesting question: basically, whether the font had a way to differentiate b/d & p/q for a potential benefit for dyslexic readers.

Of course, I can’t claim that Recursive is the best solution for dyslexia, as I have zero scientific trials and very little knowledge of dyslexia. However, I can at least consider the question.

My response there:

The Casual & Cursive axes do help disambiguate the d/b p/q letters somewhat, changing from mirrored to symmetry to rotational symmetry, and changing the forms of d & b. And in a recent update, it is possible to activate Cursive letters but keep simple diagonals (k/v/w/x/y/z). Basically, these two lines:

font-variation-settings: “CRSV” 1, “CASL” 1;
font-feature-settings: “ss07”;

That does differentiate d & b, but leaves the p & q in their default shapes, which may be a missed opportunity.

A q with a tail is a pretty common desire for people coming to fonts from an understanding of "schoolbook" style handwriting.

Even disregarding questions of whether it would be helpful for dyslexia, a q with a tail is very low-hanging fruit to make the Cursive style more “cursive” for most people. The q has no diacritics in Recursive, and shares metrics between Mono & Sans sources.

So, all it will take (I think) is copying part of the n.italic to the q.italic, then adding the q to the designspace rvrn.

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Done in sources; will be built into a release along with a few other drawing updates.

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Cursive = 1:

With ss07: