How to name Roman vs Italic

[davelab6]

I think the end result for the next round of development will be 2 files,

• Amstelvar-VF.ttf

• AmstelvarItalic-VF.ttf

And these will have a STAT table that knits them together into appearing as a single family to end users.

For the purposes of interpolation, the roman and italic are not interpolatable, so they are actually different design spaces that coincidentally work together "in parallel."

So I think the source UFOs should have 2 families, eg

family	style
Amstelvar	opszmax wghtmin
Amstelvar	opszmin wghtmax
Amstelvar Italic	opszmax wghtmin
Amstelvar Italic	opszmin wghtmax

etc

[dberlow]

Okay.

To play both advocatus diaboli, and agree with you, I’d like to approach it with a UFO for a default, and every extreme, and containing places for every glyph, but only the contours that would be specific to the ital axis via gsub, are in each ufo.

Then, develop all of those glyphs in their ufos and all of these glyphs in the Roman design space.
Glyphs that;
don’t change from Roman to italic. |_-—^~
only shift in x from Roman to italic.+/°
Only skew from Roman to italic[]#’,`, Chinese
Only rotate from Roman to italic.*
Use some combination of two of the above from Roman to italic :;@

All of these can be either scripted into their italic ufos for a companion italic variable font, or, if needs be, the scripts can be limited to populating the italic ufos with only glyphs that cannot come from the Roman...

And finally, glyphs that
Only gsub from roman to italic n,S,6

This would mean we could get to the two vfs you are requesting, but anytime we need to, we can ‘backtrack’ to an ital axis in Amstelvar, instead of two files, with the same visual results, but fewer server whatnots for use of over 3 styles of a family.

And I’m afraid if we don’t plan and execute this way, I.e. by building complete ‘italic’ glyphs repertoires for all the axes, getting the rabbit back in the hat, to a fully compatible ital axis would be tricky.

I’m also afraid if we don’t show something about this issue, I.e the mix for an integrated italic solution, fonts that contain a mixture of scripts, where such a mix effects thousands of glyphs, Someone out there is going to be Bothered but to files.

I think this will also be a helpful process augmentation in the development of Roboto, and other Google Font projects. If you're doing something else about this already, great, and we'll be making two vfs, from the start anyway.

Let us know. thanks.

[davelab6]

@dberlow I see you ended up taking the 2 files approach. Please could you explain how your thinking evolved from the above?

[dberlow]

This was written before the completion and the design review of the default, the default widths and weight, and the optical size axis. Since then, the designs have diverged pretty completely from a system of borrowing Or slanting glyphs for italic to keep the file size down.

This may still be appropriate for a Cheltenham, a slab serif or many sans, but not our Amstelvar.;)