First differences between italic and upright "roman" design

[VladWinner]

slnt (italic) variable-font axis has been removed and there are now two variable fonts, one roman and one italic, both with wght and opsz axes. ‹…› Also makes it possible for the Italic designs to diverge from the upright "roman" design, which is not possible when italic is an axis of one variable font.

Until the Italic improvements becomes the priority stage of the new update, it seems to me a good idea to just apply some features for Italic by default:

• cv05 (Lower case L with tail)
• cv11 (Single-storey a)

[rsms]

Just landed a few changes today to Italic:

• single-storey a
• "florin" style f
• continuous "smooth" e

Will consider l with serif too. Might want to add a serif to more glyphs in that case (e.g. n)

Try the latest build: (download link in first post)
#463 (comment)

[xPaw]

"cv11" 0 indeed does not seem to have any effect on the italic font in Chrome either.

[rsms]

The Italic subfamily has a humanist style, which means there's only a single-story a, long f, cursive e etc. There's no cv11 in InterVariable-Italic, only in the upright/roman version.

You can explore different features using https://rsms.me/inter/lab/

[bluebear94]

I would personally like to turn off the single-storey a to reduce confusion with U+0251, though I don’t expect to use italics with IPA that much so it might not matter.

[rsms]

@bluebear94 I'm curious, what is a scenario where you use small alpha in italic text? Help me understand what the impact of a project like adding two-storey a to Italic, because the cost is quite high (even though it might not seem like it.)

[bluebear94]

I personally wouldn’t set IPA in italics¹, but it might be used for mentioning words in another language transcribed in IPA. The latin alpha is also used in the orthographies of several languages. Of course, it would be helpful for a real linguist to comment on this topic.

Footnotes

1. Segments prescribes italics for referring to single phonemes, but it uses a completely different font for the body text. ↩