Variable Font Support Discussion (split)

[A_B_C]

Out of sincere interest, what specific aspects of color fonts make this technology interesting for you as graphic designers and typographers? 

[Patrick Connor]

Hi @Affinityconfusesme, @Alfred, @Bobby Henderson, @Bryan Rieger, @kenmcd, @MikeTO, @ronnyb

As you can see I have split these posts about the forthcoming Variable Fonts support made in this thread off into the Beta Members area. The original post by Ash will be repurposed to discuss the implementation of Variable Font support, and the talk here about other implementations (and OT discussion on Colour Fonts) would have got in the way of discussing the actual implementation and any bugs found.

The new build 2.5.0.2415 including this feature will be made available soon, and can discussed here

 

[JGD]

10 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

Hi @Affinityconfusesme, @Alfred, @Bobby Henderson, @Bryan Rieger, @kenmcd, @MikeTO, @ronnyb

As you can see I have split these posts about the forthcoming Variable Fonts support made in this thread off into the Beta Members area. The original post by Ash will be repurposed to discuss the implementation of Variable Font support, and the talk here about other implementations (and OT discussion on Colour Fonts) would have got in the way of discussing the actual implementation and any bugs found.

The new build 2.5.0.2415 including this feature will be made available soon, and can discussed here

 

Good call! This can still be a good spot for discussion on all these ideas for the future. I'll be checking it out and giving feedback on the proper forum (if there's something not really working great, or something).

While on the subject of suggestions, I'll just leave something else out here: would it be possible, at some point and if the Variable OpenType spec allowed for it, to have this panel hook into discrete values for these axes, specified by the type designer(s) and coded into the font file itself, include some sort of “snap to discrete values” toggle, and have those values appropriately previewed under the slider instead of the default 20 “steps”/21 ticks?

I know this sounds very counter-intuitive to the spirit of variable fonts, because, yes, they're great because you can fine-tune stuff, we all know that, but that's just one of its advantages. You see, as a type designer specialised in modular and geometric fonts, I work a lot with grids and stackable geometric models, à lá Josef Albers' Kombinationsschrift „3“, and would also very much benefit from distributing a single variable file instead of a bunch of different combinations like in Frutiger's Univers scheme…

This is the kind of stuff I'd love to see being added to the Variable OpenType spec, and being adopted and supported by software purveyors. Having vector UI elements to complement the axes' names would be a nice-to-have, but this would be a functional game-changer, and could even help undecided/beginner designers in other contexts… These “fixed”, traditional values could – if they don't already – also exist in traditional fonts and serve as pointers for traditional weights, and those designers might start out by picking one of them and then fine-tune them afterwards, after some test print runs or gathering user feedback on digital prototypes.

This would effectively make Variable OpenType the default go-to font format, even for fonts designed with separate, non-interpolation-friendly masters… If a piece of software was presented with one such font file, boom, the “snap to discrete values” would be turned on by default and greyed-out. Even old typefaces could be repackaged as “variable” with zero updates and still be more practical and neat to use.

As for my particular use case, and as the spec and its industry support stand, I'll have to produce and distribute instruction manuals with the recommended axis values to ensure fonts snap to their corresponding geometric grids. If the guys at FontFont managed to do that for the über-complex Chartwell and its myriad of OT Stylistic Sets, I guess I can make it, too.

[A_B_C]

You can always store predefined instances (locations in a variation space) to a variable font. Not sure what additional value a “snap to discrete values” function would provide.