Variable OpenType test fonts

Voto Serif GX (OFL)

Voto Serif GX

> Download VotoSerifGX.ttf

The Voto Serif GX is a variable OpenType font based on Noto Serif & Noto Serif Display. Noto Serif serve as the opsz axis master =12, and Noto Serif Display as the opsz axis master =72.

What’s included?

Download varfonts-ofl repo archive with font sources and tools

The ttf folder has the working font in Variable OpenType TT (.ttf) format.
The src folder has some sources and the tools folder has little helper tools.
The 00-original folder has the original .glyphs sources, with 2 axes each (weight and width), having 4 masters each (same for Italics). Most glyphs in the uprights are compatible, some have more or less trivial compatibility issues that should be resolvable via prepolation. (Note that there are interesting cases e.g. in one font a glyph is composite, in another outline-based).
The 01-merged folder has the sources for the original designs, which have the wdth axis bounds 70 and 100. In the Voto Serif fonts, compared to the original Noto fonts, some incompatible glyphs in the uprights have been compatibilized, some have been removed. But the glyphset is still large, >3,000 glyphs.
The 02-wdth-extrapol folder has the sources extrapolated to wdth 50 and 130, and the number per axis reduced to 3 instead of 4 (so 12 masters instead of 16). I’ve reduced the number of masters because of UI deficiencies in Glyphsapp, but also for reasons of practicality.
A makeInstanceMapForGlyphsapp.py tool is included which produces a handy list of instances which can be pasted into Glyphsapp’s Font Info. With this tool, I’ve made 7 x 9 x 9 = 567 predefined instances that are included in the font (and in the 02-wdth-extrapol sources). The instances are named <pointSize> <widthClass> <weightClass> e.g. 24 5 400, rather than using traditional text descriptors. This number of instances may be exaggerated but is relatively realistic for big font projects. There are in some design deficiencies, especially in the Light masters, due to the extrapolation, but these can be ignored.
03-opsz-extrapol-progress is unfinished.
I tried building the fonts with Google’s fontmake toolchain. Currently, only the upright font can be built, and even that not fully — without any GPOS. fontmake fails when trying to merge mark, mkmk and kern, regardless of whether built using feaLib or afdko (I had to tweak ufo2ft to disable autoFeatures in order to build the fonts). This font presents a good test case for authors of tools that do GPOS table generation and blending for variable fonts.

Despite the deficiencies, thanks to the wide range of wdth and wght, the opsz axis, and a large number of predefined instances, the font can serve as a good source of experiments. Note that the font does not yet contain the MVAR and STAT tables required by the OT 1.8 spec for variable fonts.

License

The fonts are licensed under the SIL Open Font License version 1.1. The tools and other content are licensed under the Apache License version 2.0.