Variable font Illustrator instance names

Glyphs
1

Hi guys,

I am playing around with a font with 4 axes and a rather large number of instances and there is no way to make Illustrator display all instances in a consistent way. As far as I understand, the order of the axes affects the way they are listed in Illustrator (i.e. if Optical size is first then the Text styles will be displayed together and Display together, etc).

I have rechecked all the instances, the values, the naming and no matter what, some instances appear in a correct order (i.e. Text Wide from Thin to Heavy) while others not (i.e. Text) . see image.

Btw, the instances display in correct order in Axis Praxis and Dinamodarkroom.
Is that a bug from Illustrator?

47
47584×1548 135 KB

2

Yes it is axis order. In TTX you can use AxisOrdering in the DesignAxisRecord of the STAT table to circumvent the order of appearance, e.g., like this:

    <DesignAxisRecord>
      <Axis index="0">
        <AxisTag value="wght"/>
        <AxisNameID value="256"/>  <!-- Weight -->
        <AxisOrdering value="1"/>
      </Axis>
      <Axis index="1">
        <AxisTag value="opsz"/>
        <AxisNameID value="257"/>  <!-- Optical size -->
        <AxisOrdering value="0"/>
      </Axis>
      <Axis index="2">
        <AxisTag value="ital"/>
        <AxisNameID value="281"/>  <!-- Italic -->
        <AxisOrdering value="2"/>
      </Axis>
    </DesignAxisRecord>
3

My STAT file is correct with the proper Axisordering.

Illustrator respects the order of the Axes but it does not respect the ordering of the weight styles for all instances. I have double checked the Weight (for WeightClass) of each instance and they all are correct and consistent but Illustrator seems to mess up the order.

See the image I attached in the previous post.

Any ideas what’s causing this?

4

I believe the weightClass is ignored for variable fonts. Only the actual weight value (slider position) counts.

5

Even if this is the case, the instance weights are correct.