Heavy and Black weights

Glyphs
1

I have named my instances Thin, Light, Medium, Bold, Heavy, and Black.
The weights are 100, 300, 500, 700, 900, 1100 (the extremes are superpolated).
The fonts do not sort correctly in InDesign menus, Black (1100) precedes Heavy (900).
In the Font Info panel I cannot force the weights to adjust, both Heavy and Black default to 900.
What am I doing wrong, please?

2

The weight class canā€™t be bigger then 1000.

3

Thanks, Georg. Glyphs did the superpolated geometry well enough though, Iā€™ll adjust the weights in the instances directly later.

4

My problem was that the real weights for instances rendering did not correspond with the available menu selections. BTW: Is it still necessary to start at weight 200 for MS applications?

Here is what I had to do to sort the weights behaviour in InDesign. Is this OK, please?

My name		Axes coordinates	Menu selection	
(desired)	(real weight)		(Glyphs name)	

Thin		 100				UltraLight 	200 
Light		 300				Light 		300	
Medium		 500				Medium		500	
Bold		 700				Bold		700	
Heavy		 900				UltraBold	800	
Black		1100				Black		900
5

Yes. Thatā€™s ok. The names in the popup menu do not matter much, only the number that results.

I recommend you also have 400 (Regular), because it can be stylelinked with 700 (Bold). Technically, you could stylelink a different weight as well, but some apps expect 400 and 700.

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6

And design wise it is better to use the width of an important stem (of the ā€˜nā€™) as you axis coordinates and pick the interpolation space visually instead of the even numbers. There are several theories about wight distribution.

7

The style linking in the Galette family should be: Thin & Medium, Light & Bold, Medium & Heavy, and Bold & Black. The obliques will follow suit, so that there will be 4 ā€œMicrosoft familiesā€ of 4 members each. Is that how itā€™s done nowadays?

8

Thatā€™s exactly what this is. Galette was an early geometric effort, very numerical, huh. So stems (V/H) are: Thin 40/30, Light 60/50, Medium 80/70, Bold 100/90, Heavy 120/110, Black 140/130. Nice and regular, the axis coordinates were chosen to produce this very sequence. It however cannot be matched precisely with Glyphs menus names or weights for that matter.

9

I see.

10

I donā€™t recommend this for two reasons:

  • because this will lead to a situation where Medium, Heavy and Black will not show up in Microsoft menus.
  • because chain-linking 3 weights, as in Thin > Medium > Heavy and Light > Bold > Black, is not possible. It is not clear if the middle style should have the bold bit switched on or not.

See the Style Linking chapter of the Naming tutorial:

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11

Thanks, Rainer, read it, and am pleased that the 250 MS curse has been lifted.
If I do not intend a release for windows, can I keep my scheme for Adobe programs? Second, do named weights in Glyphs instances menu have to correspond to reality (as in looks) or just to the stacking order for menus?

12
  1. Triplets of style linking (like above) are not possible. Otherwise you can do what you like.
  2. From experience, style linking only plays a minor role to Adobe users, since it is completely ignored in Illustrator, and accessible only through a shortcut in InDesign.
  3. Looks donā€™t matter for style linking.
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13

Thanks very much Rainer. Iā€™ll just leave it alone.

14

And you are quite right too, my scheme does not work in InDesign either.
Changing to Thin (200) Light (300) Regular (400) Bold (500) Heavy (600) Black (700), no style linking for bolding, only for obliques. Thanks again.

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