Export VF with Roman and Italic not compatible

Glyphs
1

Hey,

I’m curious if there’s a method to export a Variable Font (VF) with both Roman and Italic styles when they are incompatible.

Currently, my approach is:

  1. Add “Italic” axis
  2. Add Virtual Masters for each Italic master
  3. Copy Italic master layer into a Intermediate layers and use for Italic axis [0,01<it<1]
  4. Using “Disable Masters” to disable all real Italic Masters

Screenshot 2024-01-29 at 17.01.14

The idea of this setup is to generate a VF where Italic axis work as toggle button.
However, this approach has a significant issue: virtual masters cannot have kerning data.

2

You need one alternate layer for each master. And probably a cutoff at 0.5? here is a sample file:
Italic Alternates.glyphs (4.4 KB)

3

Thank you for your sample file, @GeorgSeifert. Although it’s not exactly what I’m looking for, sorry if my explanation wasn’t clear enough. However, your file helped me find a way to achieve what I wanted.

Italic Alternates (No Interpolation).glyphs (4.5 KB)

I’m not interested in interpolation; instead, I want to switch the italic on or off as if the axis were a button, with 0 being False and 1 being True.

Is this the only/best way to achieve this result?

4

You don’t need to do the slanting. Just added that to show what is going on. And to better understand the masters.
I would put the breakpoint in the middle.

1 Like
5

Last question, Georg: in my file, the Roman and Italic have different kerning. This leads to a slight change in spacing along the italic axis, because even though the shapes are swapped, the kerning still interpolates.

There’s no way to avoid this, right? Since alternate glyphs can’t have proper kerning.

Here is a file with the problem :
Italic Alternates (1).glyphs (4.6 KB)

6

Hi @HugoJ and @GeorgSeifert! I’m curious to know if a solution was found to avoid the problem that there is slight change in spacing along the Italic axis?

7

Sorry for not answering earlier.

True. If you need different kerning, you can’t use bracket layers. Make an extra glyphs “a.italic” and write the feature variation code yourself.