I’m working on a Kannada typeface with DJR, where the glyphs expand monstrously in one of the extreme masters.
When I exported it as a variable ttf from Glyphs App, the mark positioning of the small forms started breaking down between the ‘Normal’ and ‘Ultra Extended’ masters. On exporting the typeface as separate instances, it was working fine.
This is only happening for very wide glyphs such as with conjunct + vowel sign glyphs. In the base glyph you can see it is working okay, be it a variable or a static font. (Top: variable export, bottom: static export. Both are the Ultra Extended instances, which is also a master. The text used is ದ್ದಾ ದ್ದ).
Now, David created a small typeface with the problematic glyphs: ದಾ (the conjunct + vowel sign) and ್ದ (the small form). The code points were mapped to A and acutecomb for simplicity of typing. The same problem persists in this two-glyph typeface. Yet, we observed that this font is working okay when generated via fontmake. I am attaching a screenshot and the reduced glyphs file here.
fit-kannada-reduced.zip (111.9 KB)
Fontmake is currently throwing some odd errors when I try to export a variable font from the main Glyphs file. Ideally, we would like to export the files through Glyphs App, rather than fontmake. Is this possible?
I would like to reiterate that the problem is only occurring between the Normal and Ultra Extended masters. The other two masters and everything in between are rendering the ‘ottu’ / mark correctly. I feel this may be an issue of how wide the glyphs are in the Ultra Extended master, since narrower glyphs like ದ are rendering the mark a-okay (as shown in the screenshot before the previous one).
To test this theory, we also tried to create a new master at a reduced width and deleted the old one (whose value is 3600). The problem does not occur until the extreme master is at around 3100-3200 on the axis. I can email these files separately if necessary.
