Slant axis for script faces and more

[dberlow]

We have group of issues related to the slant and italic axes.

One issue, is working on a Latin script face with only a slant axis and i’m wondering what to do with the spec in consideration of the fact there is no style in the family with a 0 degree slant.

The default for this script face is correctly designed at -9 degrees, and the axis is ranging from -7 to -14 degrees. We don’t want to backslant it to zero as that would be a waste of design and present a default style no one wants to publish.

So one option I can see is if the default is what it is, -9, not to spec for a slant axis, and then it remains the default along the slant axis until it snaps from the default to -7 and then slants according to spec from -7 to -14.

I question whether: if every slant axis is valued in degrees, and any two slant axis can be compared and normalized to each other by matching degrees, why does the default of a slant axis have to be 0?

People here and there are also discussing making some of an italic style come from slant, and some come from the ital axis, but I wonder if that’s even possible. It seems like slant really only was specified for obliquing a whole font, and ital was specified to substitute the whole font, though some glyphs in both cases may not be slanted for design reasons.

One other issue that has been raised repeatedly regarding this is that multiple scripts may involve slants at different angles in the same instance, e.g. with a Latin slanting -9 and Arabic slanting +9 degrees, but instances on the slant axis can only have one value.

Let us know if you please, thanks.