Variable font animation?

dyb · October 12, 2018, 1:16pm

I’m not sure how to title the question. I wanted to make a font with 1 axis where the slider would just swap different outlines rather than interpolate them much like an animation. I have multiple instances with different filters as custom parameters resulting in incompatible outlines and i thought i’d put them into a variable font so i can choose instances with a slider rather than styles. How do i approach that?

mekkablue · October 12, 2018, 4:39pm

You could do bracket layers.

dyb · October 12, 2018, 4:52pm

I thought so, i was hoping there’s a different way to do this in Glyphs.
Any recommendations for external tools to do this? I could export all the instances and then mash them together right?
I’m fine with command line tools.

GeorgSeifert · October 13, 2018, 12:23am

You need to write the feature Variation table by hand in a ttx file. There are no external tools as fare as I know.

Mark · October 13, 2018, 11:06am

Do you mean something like this?

jkutilek · October 13, 2018, 12:11pm

I think fontTools.varLib supports FeatureVariations, but only if you build the from external designspace files.

mjlagattuta · October 13, 2018, 10:33pm

No need to do feature variations by hand. You can just run a script on a .ttf using fonttools. Here’s an example from @thundernixon:

github.com

thundernixon/useful-robofont-scripts-tm18/blob/master/makeVar/addItalics.py

import os

import fontTools
from fontTools.ttLib import TTFont
from fontTools.varLib.featureVars import addFeatureVariations


fontPath = "variable_ttf/recursive-mono-ext-var-italic-VF.ttf"

f = TTFont(fontPath)

condSubst = [
    # A list of (Region, Substitution) tuples.
    ([{"slnt": (0.5, 1.0)}], {"a": "a.italic"}),
    ([{"slnt": (0.5, 1.0)}], {"f": "f.italic"}),
    ([{"slnt": (0.5, 1.0)}], {"g": "g.italic"}),
    ([{"slnt": (0.5, 1.0)}], {"i": "i.italic"}),
    ([{"slnt": (0.5, 1.0)}], {"l": "l.italic"}),
    ([{"slnt": (0.5, 1.0)}], {"r": "r.italic"}),
    ([{"slnt": (0.5, 1.0)}], {"y": "y.italic"}),

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You could write a script to append glyphs with suffixes to your .glyphs file from the generated instances, and then write a script to generate the substitution array for the feature variations script.

GeorgSeifert · October 14, 2018, 12:21pm

With “by hand” I meant writing scripts or type the xml (not sure what would be easier/faster in this case ;)).

Johannes · October 17, 2018, 9:48pm

i assume its not exactly what you‘re looking for, but on www.dinamodarkroom.com you can animate and loop through Varible Fonts (which you need to drag in there)!