When I open a CFF2 VF OTF file (from open source CJK fonts), one of the weights is missing. In this example, the Heavy weight is missing, there’s only ExtraLight.
Opening a VF TTF file (a different font) is fine, with all axes detected, but I don’t like dealing with quadratic curves. I will add the picture in a reply since I am new here.
Please add support for weights (and other axes) for CFF2 VF OTF files.
And this is how opening a VF TTF file (from a different open source CJK font) looks like, with weights and another axe (padding, to reduce glyph size for better reading) of the font detected.
Glyphs doesn’t support CFF based variable fonts, yet.
what do you mean by that?
It’s a variable axe that is called “padding” (called PADG), and the font author of the second example creates another master that basically scales down (transforms) the glyphs a bit, like around 98% of the original size. Nothing to do with file size.
I hope that supporting it will be considered in a future update. For now I guess I’ll have to work around this limitation by opening another file format like VF TTF or static OTFs (if a font has such options) and recreating the glyphs manually. If not, I’ll wait for the font author (in the first example) to release the UFO sources.
for OpenSource fonts you should be able to find the original source, those are usually .ufo/designspace or .glyphs files. Those will make it much easier get started working on the fonts.
I understand, but for complex CJK fonts like Source Han Sans/Serif, obtaining the overlapping outline sources is not so easy (although there are overlapping sources due to it being VF ready), so it’s not as easy as accessing the UFO or .glyphspackage sources.
Apparently there is a great amount of complexity in building the font due to the project’s aim of including special “LOCL” OpenType features and glyph mappings between different regions, so they don’t use Glyphs but rather some proprietary tools to design the glyphs and open source command line tools like AFDKO to build the font with all sorts of complex OpenType features.
I did manage (with some help) to figure out how to import the overlapping sources from the original Source Han Sans/Serif GitHub repository into Glyphs for editing using command line tools, but for other Source Han Sans/Serif forks, it depends on the font author whether they can easily provide the sources or not. Some of them do not release the UFO overlapping sources at all, maybe because they might use some other proprietary font editing software (or FontForge) to do their own glyphs and only export the final font from there. That’s why I’m contacting the font authors to see if they can assist with providing the overlapping sources.
Anyway, this is getting a little off-topic. I hope that you can consider supporting OTF VF files for editing in case the font authors do not provide the original source files.
