Unexpected Variable font behaviour around Axis Defaults

[ghost]

When generating proofing pdfs for a variable font at different locations in the designspace, the default location is frequently displaying as the minimum value for a given axis.

For example, a font with the axes below may return correctly at (wght=500, wdth=101) and (wght=500, wdth=99) but effectively display (wght=500, wdth=75) when passed (wght=500, wdth=100).

This is replicable with the trial versions of Grtsk and Venn.

font('TRYGrtskVariable')

for axis, data in listFontVariations().items():
    print((axis, data))
    
fontSize(180)
fontVariations(wght=400, wdth=299, slnt=0)
text('Test', (100,734))

fontVariations(wght=400, wdth=300, slnt=0)
text('Test', (100,538))

fontVariations(wght=400, wdth=301, slnt=0)
text('Test', (100,356))

[justvanrossum]

I've observed this as well. I may be an OS issue. On which OS are you?

[ghost]

macOS Mojave, v. 10.14.5

[justvanrossum]

Anyone here able to see whether this issue still exists on 10.15?

https://twitter.com/jjgod/status/1179892274487906304

[justvanrossum]

Presumably this has been fixed on 10.15. Let's keep this open until we know for sure.

[typemytype]

this seems to be fixed on 10.15

[arrowtype]

Did anyone make any changes to the DrawBot code to fix this issue (e.g. shifting values by minute amounts to work around the issue)? I still experience similar problems in Sketch on macOS 10.15, but haven't had the problem in DrawBot, recently. (If there were workarounds put into DrawBot, I would expect them to be in drawBot/context/tools/variation.py, but I see nothing that looks like a patch here, though I could obviously be wrong.)

Variation axes are looking good in DrawBot:

But I problems in Sketch:

As far as I know, both DrawBot and Sketch use Core Text (native macOS text rendering). Is this correct for DrawBot? If so, is there some kind of reason you can guess that this would work in DrawBot, but not in Sketch? Just hoping to update reports with Apple & Sketch to get this resolved, if possible. :)

[typemytype]

there where no changed made to fix this issue inside DrawBot, I assume its been fixed in the os/CoreText.