Generate Italics

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Experiment: can we generate italic sources by duplicating and skewing original sources, well enough that they could be added into the variable font, entirely in the build?

TL;DR: No, if we only add italics as a generation step in the build, too many shapes look bad. It will be worthwhile to make some basic manual corrections to italic sources, even though it will add some complexity to the project.

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Update: with just a bit of semi-manual work, I was able to make a prototype of the variable font which includes an italic axis.

I used a script to generate skewed UFOs from the sources of the build, then made a designspace with the upright plus slanted sources. I did have to remove a few glyphs that were immediately compatible, but I suspect I could get past those issues with a bit more work.

One promising opportunity here would be to create the italics entirely in the build, similar to how the bounce and tracking axes are being generated from only a few base sources.

Slanted to 9.46 degrees

Tested with Font Gauntlet:

Kapture.2022-03-17.at.22.02.47.mp4

Tested with Type-X:

It’s hard to say whether this is enough slant to be clear as italics... some of the slightly "backslanted" glyphs in the upright sources (especially P) do cause special issues of the italics being a little hard to recognize as such.

The main potential issue it reveals is that the contrast distortions do become somewhat noticeable in diagonal strokes, and more so at lighter weights.

Potentially, it will be useful to make italic sources where the diagonals are corrected, but most other things are left without correction. The thing is, the more corrections we add, the harder it is to make things work smoothly in a single variable font. When it’s only skewed, the great thing is that it should theoretically cause no kinks. Also, it’s obviously way less to manage in the near and far future.

Next steps:

• test slightly more slant (e.g. 11.31 degrees)
• test on Cyrillics, when possible

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I built the below files in the zip below with fontmake version 2.4.2:

ital_wght_BNCE_IRGL_TRAK--prepped.zip

fontmake -o variable -m sources/wght_BNCE_IRGL_TRAK--prepped/shantell_sans-ital_wght_BNCE_IRGL_TRAK.designspace

(These are build artifacts, so they are in the .gitignore.)