Instance as Master with the ability to select only masters that will be used for interpolation

Glyphs
1

I have a project with Weight, Width, and Italic axes. The image shows which masters are drawn (black color). I need to interpolate some missing masters (blue color) like Condensed Black, in order to then refine them instead of drawing them from scratch.

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So I made an instance called Condensed Black and I need to made a master from it. When I press the + icon and choose “Instance as Master” option, then ALL the masters are involved in the interpolation process, and this is not what I want because some masters affect the stem thickness (and some metrics) of created new master, in a bad way.

What I need is to strictly interpolate Condensed Black from: Regular, Condensed, Black. From only these masters, without involving the others. On the image, I marked these masters with a blue square.

The first thing I tried is to add the custom parameter “Disable Masters” to Condensed Black instance, and listed there all the masters that shouldn’t be involved in interpolation. From its description, looks like it should do the job. But for a some reason it doesn’t affect anything and when I converted this instance into master, there are wrong stems and metrics anyway.

As a workaround that really work – I made a temporary copy of the main project, remove all the masters which shouldn’t be involved, interpolate, and then copy interpolated new master from temporary to the main project. But this is not so convenient.

Maybe I miss something. I would appreciate any ideas.

2

Other than doing this with a script, this is currently the best solution.

I agree that having this as a functionality would be very useful, but it sounds more like something for a script than a native functionality.

3

Perhaps, yes. I’ll dig in a scripting direction.

I remember I had the same issue in Fontlab, but there was an option to disable masters.
By the way, here’s a similar request asked by Gor.

4

You could try to add a Disable Masters parameter to the instance and add all the masters you don’t like contributing to the instance.

5

Apparently, that didn’t work.

6

Yeah I tried that, but looks like Disable Masters parameter doesn’t work, or maybe I listed the masters wrongly. Here’s how I listed the masters in it:

Thin, Thin Italic, Italic, Black Italic
7

One master per line.

1 Like
8

The devil is in details.
Thank you very much!