After many hours of experimenting and testing here are some of my findings regarding installation of variable fonts on Mac Ventura (where there are separate Regular and Italic .ttfs) . YMMV
- The main bug I found with using Font Book to install Variable TT fonts occurs when you right-click on a VF TT .ttf and choose ‘Open with Font Book’.
- If you open Font Book, right-click on either ‘All Fonts’ or ‘My Fonts’ and choose “Add fonts to…” then it generally seems to work fine. Dragging/dropping to either /Library/Fonts or ~/Library/Fonts also seems to work as long as the VF TT fonts are configured properly
- Since I’m re-engineering the VF TT to replace all prior instances of specific fonts (over 20 years) I’m working on an installer package that tries to archive all prior versions, replace with new versions and then do a Clean Font Cache (which varies based upon OS version)
- I’m using Packages for deployment
- Prior to deploying the payload(s) I have pre- and post- shell scripts that take care of much of the cleanup work. Since these require admin privileges, it is a little more difficult to get the permissions and installation configured properly.
- We’re choosing to install VF TT fonts for All Users to ensure a consistent environment for historical documentation (although the installer can change domains if necessary).
- If anyone is interested in the shell scripts (or packages) I can post them separately. They’re not works of art as I know just enough to be dangerous and need more learning time.