What is slabmod?

SlabMod is a modified font designed to make Latin text play nicely alongside Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. It's built for situations where you're mixing languages together, like a Chinese textbook with English terms or a website with multilingual content, and you want everything to line up cleanly instead of looking slightly off. The project starts from an existing font called Slabo, which was built to stay readable at small sizes on screens. The original uses "old-style" numbers, the kind where digits like 3 and 9 hang below the line, similar to how some lowercase letters do. That's fine for all-English text, but when you place those numbers next to Chinese characters, the misalignment becomes obvious. SlabMod swaps in "lining" numbers that sit evenly on the baseline, so digits and CJK characters share a consistent vertical alignment. Beyond the number fix, the font adds support for Hanyu Pinyin letters, the Romanized pronunciation system for Mandarin Chinese. This includes characters with tone marks like ǎ, ǒ, and ǖ. With this addition, the font can handle Chinese language learning materials, pinyin annotations above characters, and similar educational uses where tone marks are essential. The font files come in TTF format for desktop use, plus WOFF and WOFF2 formats for web embedding. It's released under the SIL Open Font License, which means it's free to use, modify, and redistribute, including in commercial projects. This project makes a targeted tradeoff: rather than designing a brand-new typeface, it takes an existing, well-tested font and adjusts it for a specific multilingual context. That keeps the original's readability strengths intact while solving a real alignment problem for CJK typesetting.