Questions About Variable Type

I’m working on a monospaced variable typeface, it contains 4 masters.

When exporting I noticed that the Bold Italic weight is growing when changing the width/italic sliders, I’ve also noticed that the glyphs in Illustrator are different than the ones on Glyphs. Photos below. Not sure why this is happening as the Bold Italic is a master, so it’s not interpolating anything.

BOLD ITALIC in Glyphs

BOLD ITALIC in Ai

GLYPHS FILE
*SIGNAL - V2.3.glyphs (119.8 KB)

Export the typeface as variable and then bring it into Font Gauntlet or Ai to see what I’m talking about first hand.

Looking forward to hearing back!

I would try values of 100 for the italic axis value in all of your italic masters and instances. (Right now they range from 100 to 900.) Would that fit what you’re trying to accomplish?

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Yes, the two italic masters need the same coordinate for the Italic axis. Doesn’t matter what it is but you could use the actual angle (8°).

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What would that make my italic axis value? If you wouldn’t mind informing me on what your axis values would be for this typeface that would be super helpful!

I was also wondering why I see the ‘width class’ on my masters when my two axes are weight & italic. Do these two issues tie together?

I set them as 100, 200 & 300 to do a test and I got the same result when exporting.

The two upright masters will get ‘0’ for the italic axis, the slanted ones get any number, as long as it is the same.

If that’s the case both my upright masters Italic Angle is set to ‘0°’ and the slanted masters are ‘8°’

Shouldn’t it work?

Edit:

I understand now, I set the italic axis to 100 all around and it works perfectly. If you wouldn’t mind I’d love to understand why this functions like this. I’ve experimented with weight & width before and had no problems going from 100-900, 1-200, etc.

Why for italic does it have to stay the same?

Thanks for all the help! Glad to have figured it out.

Whether the weight is heavy or light, the degree of “italicness” is intended to be the same, so should be represented by the same value.

For weight and width, most likely you’ll need several stops along the spectrum (light, regular, bold, black) and thus several different values to mark those intermediate positions. But in this design there’s just not-italicized, and italicized—two endpoints of the axis, no intermediate positions required, thus just two values.

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That makes perfect sense, thank you for the detailed explanation!