The Fold

A no-options Markdown typesetter that emits vector-first PDF. Every spacing, weight, and rank decision has already been argued over, so you don't have to. Press fold pdf. That is the entire user interface.

Install for VS Code The editor is coming ↓

Apple Silicon macOS today. Windows and Linux are in the machinery.

A VS Code window, split. Left: an ordinary Markdown file — a title, two
paragraphs, a fenced Rust block. Right: the finished PDF of the same
document — dark ground, Funnel Display title, Funnel Sans body, the code
sitting in a square-cornered panel. Between the two panes: nothing.
There was no dialog. There will never be a dialog.

Six eras of putting language on a surface

Typesetting has had exactly a handful of genuinely new ideas. We keep the list short so nobody gets flattered by accident.

Stylus and clay
Pictoforms pressed into wet earth. Language becomes an object for the first time. Every glyph is drawn by a hand that means it.
The phonetic alphabet
The great compression. A few dozen shapes encode anything a mouth can do. The glyph stops being a picture and becomes a part.
Ink, parchment, letterform art
The scribal millennium. Letterforms become craft — counters, ascenders, the weight of a stroke as an aesthetic decision.
Movable type
The letter becomes hardware. The craft splits in two: the punchcutter keeps the art, the compositor gets the arithmetic.
Industrial type
The Linotype: an ambassador from the machine age that threw lines of molten lead, ninety characters a minute, and never apologized. An inflection point, and as good an emblem of human achievement as anyone has bolted to a floor.
Unicode emoji
The return of the hieroglyph, riding in through the character table. Pictoforms again — full circle, and nobody planned it.

And after that: nothing. Decades of tooling, no new era. Until now — because for the first time, the two halves that movable type split apart can merge again. Letterform art and industrial type, one machine. A typesetter that makes hand-drawn judgments at cast-lead speed. That is what The Fold is for.

The editor — coming

The Fold today is a renderer: Markdown in, typeset PDF out. The Fold next is an intermediate document editor — the desk between the writing and the page. Two columns, two instruments.

Left: the content

Multiscale, wavelet-style editing of the raw text, LM-assisted. Zoom out and revise the argument; zoom in and revise the sentence. The document as a signal you can edit at any frequency.

Right: the layout

A human layout instrument in which every control answers to the mouse wheel alone. One column, two, three — wheel. Upsize, downsize — wheel. No panels, no palettes, no forty-tab inspector. Your hand stays on one dial, like it would on a press.

The editor mockup. Left column: prose at three zoom levels stacked like
a wavelet decomposition — paragraph, section, document — with an LM
annotation pinned to the middle band. Right column: the same document as
a live typeset spread; a cursor hovers and a subtle ring around the
pointer indicates the wheel is the only control. Ghosted hint beneath:
"scroll: columns · shift-scroll: size".

Reserve a seat

The rules we broke, knowingly

There are Universal Rules of In-Trend Type Layout and Art, as established in the canon of roughly 2025. We studied them. Then we broke them — with temper, on purpose, and in writing, which is what separates a decision from an accident.

Rule: everything is a rounded rectangle

Eighteen months and counting of the rounded rectangle as the dogmatic form of the visual div — adopted thoughtlessly, without macro composition, to the point where interior objects routinely carry radii larger than or equal to their containers. This should never happen. Ever. And in a pluralistically designed interface space it happens constantly.

Our container is a page, and a page has corners. So the code blocks and accent blocks here — and in every PDF The Fold emits — are square-cornered, radius zero, stated rather than defaulted.

Status: broken, with confidence

Corollary: except where the corner breaks the text

Inline code is different. A square corner inside a paragraph is jarring to the tuned eye; the inline block must support the focal text, never draw attention from it. So inline code here carries text-proportion radii — corners sized to the type, too small to notice. Look at any inline span above. You didn't notice. That was the point.

Status: tempered in context

Rule: no skeuomorphism (but gradients are back)

The return of the gradient is a fine trend, and canon says use it boldly while abolishing skeuomorphism. We did the opposite twice. A typesetter that emulates folded paper is necessarily skeuomorphic — the tactile connection to the sheet is the principal thrust of the machine, so skeuomorphism stays.

And the gradients stay nearly invisible: fourth rank in contrast, a highlight and shadow at each thematic break — CommonMark's own name for the horizontal rule — hinting a third dimension at the folds. Not visible to the untrained eye; registers at the vibes level. And because gradients do not print, they are non-printing, handled in the binary writer, like the background itself. The page you print is flat; the page you read is not.

Status: broken in both directions at once

We knew the rules. We did it anyway. The local layout constables will take exception; the federales will understand that everything here is in harmony with galactic order.

A disclaimer, for the reader who noticed nothing

If none of the above registered — if you read this page and simply found it easy to read — then everything is working. You were never supposed to see the layout. You were supposed to see the text.

This is the layout artist's highest achievement: to amplify the coherence and comprehension of the text without ever being noticed. The conduit, the communication, the content — not the layout. We are serious, attentive, and reasoning about every radius and rank precisely so that you never have to be. The joke is in the tone. The typesetting is not a joke.

Our conscience in these matters is Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style — the book that treats the page as a craft with obligations rather than a panel of preferences. Typography is invisible in proportion to its success. We intend to succeed invisibly.

Funnel Display, the typeface that made us say it out loud

Wow. This is clever.

That was the actual, audible reaction. After this many years of digitally enabled type design, a face that still gets an exclamation out of a jaded reader is doing something.

A contemporary neo-grotesque display face by Kristian Möller, the Stockholm-based type designer, together with brand agency NORD ID — built for Funnel, released open under the SIL Open Font License. The stated concept: the movement and shapes of data points. In the Display cut, parts of the stems are shifted — displaced mid-stroke — to carry that sense of movement into the letterforms. That is the clever part: one disciplined idea applied consistently, not a costume. The Fold sets its titles in Funnel Display and its body in Funnel Sans Light for exactly this reason. So does this site.

Family: Funnel Display + Funnel Sans
Classification: Contemporary neo-grotesque; Display eccentric, Sans sturdy
Concept: The movement and shapes of data points; shifted stems in the Display
Weights / styles: 15 across the family, variable axes
Design: Kristian Möller with NORD ID, Stockholm
License: SIL Open Font License, via Google Fonts

Möller cuts custom faces for Northvolt, SEB, Stockholm transit (SL), Pensionsmyndigheten, JM Bygg, Zoégas and Elkjøp; his Vasakronan face won the 24th TDC Typeface Design Competition in 2021. He runs the Dicotype foundry. An emerging Hoefler? We said it, not you.

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