Hello.
I’m working on a monospace font. What I’m trying to achieve is to use the variable features in such a way that will enable the user of the font to adjust both the spacing between letters and lines of text by the same amount so they can make the text look tight or loose. (I’m probably not making much sence, so please see attachment). Is there a way to do that?
This is not something that is well-suited to be solved by variable fonts. Changing the spacing between letter can be done, but not the line height. You could use variable fonts to scale the outlines within the square, but I think generally spacing of letters and lines is best left to the app typesetting the text, not the font.
It might be possible with MVAR. That is not supported in Glyphs, yet. But I’m not sure how well that is supported. Adobe has its own way to compute line heights so I suspect that it would not support MVAR.
One thing you could try is instead of increasing the saving and line hight, you scale down the shapes.
Scaling down the shapes is a good idea, but it would also create other problems for the user. In the end, since what I wanted to do cannot be done, I think that the best way to go would be to leave everything as is and have the user manually adjust spacing. Thank you for the taking the time though, cheers!
Spacing is not a problem, search the forum for variable GPOS, optical size spacing. It’s really simple to implement with Glyphs.
Line height is where it gets tricky. I’m not sure whether you want one without the other, though, it looks like they are intended to work in parallel.
Yes, unfortunately that was the idea, spacing and line height should increase/decrease together. Thanks for the suggestion though, much appreciated.
