VF Menu Ordering Issue

Glyphs
1

Hi all,

I’m running into a menu-ordering issue with a variable font family and wondered if anyone could point me toward the likely cause.

The condensed family has three proportional “height” groups, which I’m currently mapping semantically using WidthClass:

  • Short = 1 (Ultra Condensed)
  • Medium = 2
  • Tall = 3

…with weights inside each:

  • Thin
  • Regular
  • Black

The static OTF exports behave correctly in Adobe apps and Figma, sorting as expected by WidthClass then WeightClass.

However, the VF behaves differently in both Figma and macOS Font Book. The VF instances are grouped by weight correctly, but the ordering within each weight group becomes:

Medium Thin
Short Thin
Tall Thin

…etc.

What’s interesting is:

  • this is NOT alphabetical ordering (I even added an “a” prefix to one style name and the order was unaffected)

  • changing style names doesn’t affect it

  • the static exports sort correctly using the same naming logic

Has anyone run into similar VF ordering behaviour before, particularly in Figma or Font Book?

Thanks!

order
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Exports
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2

Instances are ordered by axis order. So swap your two axes (you can just drag and drop one to the other position in Font Info > Font).

3

Hi Sebastian!

I was sure this simple suggestion would crack it, but alas I’m still getting an unusual order.
I played with changing the font origin and swapping the master order but no positive change.
Any thoughts?

order2
order2322×440 28.1 KB

4

What app are you testing this in?

You can’t control the instance order apart from axis order, and this might also vary from application to application. Nothing else you can do apart from setting the correct weight and width class (for static fonts) and ordering the axes (for variable fonts).

5

Thanks @SCarewe

I’m testing in:
Font Book and Figma which mirror each other (assuming because Figma is looking your system installed fonts)
MS Word - Listing by Weight despite ‘High’ being first axis
Adobe, Illustrator and InDes – These are showing the fonts in the order I wanted/expected.

The Variable Origin, seems to have a small effect - It’s the style Font Book shows to represent the font (but doesn’t effect the main list order) and in Adobe, whichever style you choose jumps it to the top of the list but without changing the rest of the ordering.

Does the order of my masters and instances (in the Masters/Export tabs) have any effect?

All the best

Jamie

6

No.

Are you sure that you’re not running into font cache issues? If the style ordering is correct in InDesign and other application where you are 100% certain that you’re testing the latest files, that’s all you need to know.

In any case, you can’t do anything more about the style ordering than what you’ve already set up.

7

I’m changing the name of the font on each adjustment, so I don’t think so.
Fair enough. Thank you!

8

One thing is did seem to figure out after much testing — which I’ll leave here as a note:

Master order and VF origin style are linked in that the your master order determines origin list order.

If you don’t choose the top master as origin it can play havoc with PS and InDes VF instance menu lists, or at least did in my case.

9

Can you explain?

10

Hi @GeorgSeifert

I chose the second master down on the font origin list and in both PS and InD the instance menu only showed the one instance I’d chosen. I didn’t take a screenshot but if I get a moment next week, I’ll try to recreate it.

11

did you check if it was really about the first/not first or just that it was a different master? Try to reorder the masters (so that the origin is always first) …