Variable fonts guide (`ital` axis): use a more straightforward font?

[danburzo]

The particular font choice in the Variable fonts guide: italic axis seems to complicate what is already not straightforward about the ital axis in CSS, as Jost-VF uses three states: 0, 1, and 2.

I would suggest replacing it with a font that just uses the 0 and 1 state, but I don't know what a good font for that might be. Maybe @jpamental has some ideas here?

[zfox23]

Wow, this is so fascinating! Thanks for opening up this issue, @danburzo - this is the first time I'm learning about variable fonts.

How can you tell that Jost-VF uses three states for the "ital" axis?

When I change font-variation-settings: 'ital' 1; to font-variation-settings: 'ital' 2; in the live example, I don't notice any changes. Am I misunderstanding the states? Or is there some other limitation I don't understand?

[danburzo]

Hi @zfox23, re-reading this thread now and not quite remembering the original circumstances for logging this issue, I’m not sure what led me to conclude that Jost-VF uses three states: 0, 1, and 2. The original font, as seen here, does have an ital axis that spans the range [0-2], but the version used in the MDN example indeed only spans the range [0-1]. font-variation-settings: 'ital' 0.5 should look different from font-variation-settings: 'ital' 1.

Sorry for sowing more confusion!

(Maybe there was some piece of lingering metadata in the font that still referenced the [0-2] range and 2022-era Firefox dev tools were picking up on it, and have been fixed in the meantime? There’s a lesson in here for me to write more detailed reports.)

With fresh eyes, the thing that needs changing is the phrase:

The Italic (ital) axis works differently in that it is either on or off; there is no in-between.

There is an in-between. The OpenType specification states that the value has the range [0-1], not just the values 0 and 1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/dvaraxistag_ital

[zfox23]

That's super helpful! Thanks for the quick followup. I'll make that change tomorrow. I'm always glad to learn about typography.