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Notepad doesn't show NON-italic versions of non-wide variable width fonts

Open eugenesvk opened this issue 9 months ago • 6 comments

Only the Wide variant is straight

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(Office apps have the same issue, if you select Normal font, it's always italicized, but Wide variant is straight)

eugenesvk avatar Mar 31 '25 14:03 eugenesvk

The v1.200 fonts are not going to work in applications which use the STAT table (such as Notepad, Word, LibreOffice, etc.) primarily because the names are too long. When the long names are truncated to 32 characters in the application, some of the names then become duplicates - which confuses the applications. And there is an additional issue with how the slant axis and the italic axis are handled in the STAT table - which is why you see the italics confusion.

Even the static fonts have this same names-too-long issue with the normal name fields.

Right now the only way you are going to get this to work in Notepad is to rename the static fonts to much shorter names.

kenmcd avatar Mar 31 '25 18:03 kenmcd

Oh, bad old designs strike again. If it's a universal issue even with static fonts, shouldn't the default names be abbreviated? Like Monaspace Ar Med It

eugenesvk avatar Apr 01 '25 02:04 eugenesvk

In my case when I tried to use the variable font in Firefox, everything becomes italic and completely unusable. I tried to use ttx to replace every "Monaspace Neon Var" to just "MNV" in the name table, but it doesn't fix the issue: non-slant text are still italic, but italic text become non-slant. I guess there are more than one table needs fixing.

CrendKing avatar Apr 18 '25 01:04 CrendKing

In my case when I tried to use the variable font in Firefox, everything becomes italic and completely unusable. I tried to use ttx to replace every "Monaspace Neon Var" to just "MNV" in the name table, but it doesn't fix the issue: non-slant text are still italic, but italic text become non-slant. I guess there are more than one table needs fixing.

There is no "italic" in the variable fonts. So if you are specifying Italic in the CSS you are probably getting a fake italic or a fallback.

Some browsers have issues with other axes such as opsz - it does not take the axis default correctly. So you have set it directly. That could be happening here (wild guess). So set the slant axis in both your Roman/upright text and for your slanted "italic" text.

Like above, you may have to use renamed static fonts. But AFAIK browsers do not have same name-length issues. And the static fonts have actual italic fonts. Statics may work as-is.

kenmcd avatar Apr 18 '25 14:04 kenmcd

I worked around by rebuilding the font with gftools (with the default splitItalic: true). The roman and italic variable fonts are generated separately, so in applications that are compatible before I can manually pick the roman face. I don't see any problem so far.

CrendKing avatar Apr 27 '25 00:04 CrendKing

I was experiencing the same issue with 1.301, strangely it seemed like the fix for #339 made some variants of the variable fonts italic by default (in browser for example), and setting font-style: italic actually made them upright again. Maybe the slant axis is flipped backwards or something?

ian-h-chamberlain avatar Nov 06 '25 17:11 ian-h-chamberlain