Variable font

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בן של מלך
Posts: 58
Joined: Wed May 25, 2022 4:29 pm
Location: Hadera, Israel

Variable font

Post by בן של מלך »

Hi, I'm in the middle of learning to edit variable fonts with the rvrn feature.
I would be very happy if anyone here has a font with this feature, it will greatly help me to continue my studies.
Email address for receiving the font, bz0556799161@gmail.com
In general, does a font creator support this?
Erwin Denissen
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Re: Variable font

Post by Erwin Denissen »

Yes, in fact FontCreator is the only font editor that completely supports this and other advanced OpenType layout features.

In most cases you need to provide an empty rvrn feature and then add another rvrn feature that contains a substitution lookup. You can then select Variations located at the bottom in the left tree view and then click the Add button. From there you can assign Variation Conditions and Variation Feature Substitutions.

Numerous open source variable fonts use this approach. For example Recursive and Montserrat.
Montserrat2021.png
Montserrat2021.png (449.34 KiB) Viewed 4570 times
Note that an earlier version of Montserrat used a less conventional approach as it contains two masters close to each other to imitate a substitution. I suspect it was done this way simple because at that time there was no easy way to add feature variations to a font.
Montserrat2019.png
Montserrat2019.png (390.03 KiB) Viewed 4570 times
It was a funny experiment back then, but you should now use either rvrn or rclt.
Erwin Denissen
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בן של מלך
Posts: 58
Joined: Wed May 25, 2022 4:29 pm
Location: Hadera, Israel

Re: Variable font

Post by בן של מלך »

Thank you very much, you helped me a lot, now I will open the font and see how it is made.
(Apologies for the broken English, it's after translation).
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