I’m making a family which will have several weights/style variations, but these will not be interpolated from masters. Does it make sense to use masters/instances in glyphs? I like the idea of having it all in one file and being able to easily access/compare different variations, but I wonder if it’s not unnecessarily complicated. Any thoughts or advice?
It is possible but not advisable.
You could fit different weights into one file but probably not the different style. The later will produce different outlines and glyph sets and this will confuse the feature generator, the kerning and the then Master compatibility indicator.
I suspected that, thanks!
Just to expand on this - I have made a font with two different weights that I’ve created from scratch - I’ve made one Bold and one Regular but when I export it to OTF it just has the regular,not bold. Am I missing something?
Masters are your INPUT,
Instances are the OUTPUT.
Look into File > Font Info > Instances. You need to create instances there and make sure they’re active.
What its done is create two OTF, one called regular and one called Bold - but both of them are the regular version.
In instances I’ve checked “is active”. Marked the weight as regular and bold respectively. The names are regular and bold respectively. Is there something I’ve missed?
Thanks for the swift reply.
Please read the manual about setting up a multiple master font.
Forgive me.
I’ve got them to work now, but I don’t really understand the interpolation numbers even after reading the manual. As long the bold number was larger than the regular number it worked, but I couldn’t see any difference if I put 110 or 100 or whatever.
Can someone let me know how this works?
Sorry - I’m just starting out with typography.
The bold number is supposed to be larger than the regular.
If the Regular Master has Weight=100 and the Bold Master Weight=200, you can e.g. have Instances like Regular=100, Medium=120, Semibold=160, Bold=200.
It’s a good idea to use your stem widths as Weight numbers.