Microsoft Office wierd behavior with italics

Glyphs
1

Hello everyone !

I am creating my very first font which is variable in weight and slant. The weight goes from 400 to 750 and the slant goes from 0 to -10 (I checked some variable files from Google Fonts and apparently the slant is usually set as a negative value :thinking:).
I have 8 instances. 4 weights : 400 Regular, 500 Medium, 600 SemiBold and 700 Bold ; plus an Italic instance for each weight.

Everything works perfectly everywhere, except on Microsoft Office softwares, where the behavior is kind of strange :

  1. On mac, instances appear like this : MyFont › Regular Italic, Regular Italic, Medium Italic, Medium Italic, SemiBold Italic, SemiBold Italic, Bold Italic, Bold Italic. Whatever I choose, the font will show with the italic button toggled on, but what I see is not italic at all. I can toggle off and on the italics, but nothing changes, except the angle of the cursor.
    —
  2. On windows, there is one item in the list with the name of my font, plus the Medium and SemiBold weight left on the side. I read articles and topics on the forum about Naming and RIBI families, so I kind of understand why the font appears like this, but the main problem is the same : I cannot get the software to give me italics.

I cleaned my cache between each of my multiple attempts so this is not the cause.
Has anyone ever encountered this issue ?

Thank you very much for your help.

PS : Glyphs is awesome !

2

  1. You say your font is variable, does that mean you are exporting (and installing) it as a variable font? Or as single instance font files?

  2. Can you post screenshots of your instance settings (the Exports tab)? Have you set up style linking correctly?

  3. Where (in which software) does it work “perfectly”, what is your intended result? I assume you mean that the font appears with its eight styles.

3

There might be some issues with the STAT table. It can contain some info about style linking but that is not fully supported by Glyphs (when I properly implement this, I can remove the Beta badge from the export dialog).

4

Thanks SCarewe !

  1. Yes, I export and install it as a variable font (.ttf file).
    Actually I also did try to export and install as single instance font files but the result was worse. The appearance of the font in the list was the same, but when selecting a style, another font showed up (I don’t know which one). It was set to my font, but another font was displayed.

  2. Yes of course, I’ll add screenshots (Edit : I tried to send all eight screenshots but since I’m a new user, I can only send one attachment).
    Linking settings : Bold is bold of Regular, Bold Italic is bold & italic of Regular, Italic is italic of Regular, Medium Italic is italic of Medium, SemiBold Italic is italic of SemiBold.

    SemiBold Italic
    SemiBold Italic1858Ă—1617 220 KB

  3. Yes sorry my description wasn’t very precise on that point. “Working perfectly” means showing all eight styles in a logical order (+ giving access to variable axes when the tool allows it). And it does on all programs of the Adobe Suite, on Figma and on all Apple tools (TextEdit, Pages etc.).

5

Thank you GeorgSeifert !

Does this mean that this should be considered as a “normal behavior” until the next update of Glyphs3 ?

6

Probably.

7

Ok, I’ll keep an eye on future updates.

Thank you very much :slightly_smiling_face: