I often make duplicate masters of designs of a similar weight, for comparison, or to develop into alternates. I must give these a weight value to be able to generate instances, and so I ensure each one has a different number (usually just start from 1 and increase the increments). As no weight change is involved, this feels a bit like a fudge. Is there a tidier way around this? or maybe when a master is duplicated, it could have a different weight number?
Are you creating intermediate layers for your alternates? Or duplicating an entire master? In any event there is a better way.
I would duplicate the glyphs you want to make alternate versions of, then give all these new glyphs the .cv01 appendix. Now you can easily compare the two designs in context by simply setting the character variation OpenType feature. There are 99 slots should you need them. Just remember to update the automatic features after you created the glyphs.
thank you, I shall check it out