"Negative" white spaces in intersections in some letters

[theblursed]

Hello CatharsisFont,

I recently discovered your Ysabeau font on Google Fonts, and downloaded it. It is gorgeous. Compliments for your wonderful work. I appreciate not only the beauty of the design but also the richness of the glyphs set, which would make it perfect for linguistics, an important field for me.

Unfortunately, I have a problem, which in practice makes the font unusable for most texts. While the font shows correctly on Google Fonts, when downloaded in my computer (Mac) some "negative" white spaces appear in intersections of shapes in common letters, where they should be black (see picture). I have the same issue in Word, TextEdit, Font Book, LibreOffice.

I'm not an expert of fonts or coding (I actually just signed up here just to write this to you), but I like them a lot and have a lot, and I think this is the first time that I've found a difference between how the font appears on Google Fonts and how it appears on my computer.

Do you think it could be fixed?

Thank you and keep up the good work.

[CatharsisFonts]

Not on my side...

Which version are you using? OTF or TTF? Where did you download it?

EDIT: Oh, you said Google Fonts. I had no idea it had already been uploaded! Yay! 😁 I'll check it out...

Glad you like Ysabeau! 🧸

Cheers, Christian

[CatharsisFonts]

So at first sight, the fonts from Google Fonts work well on my machine, and I'm not getting any overlap issues. Do you get the same problems with the fonts from this repository?

[theblursed]

Yes, what I did was: Google Fonts > download whole family > unzip > "static" folder > install all fonts.

I now downloaded the files from the repository here, as you said.

If I install the .ttf files from the repository, the same issue appears as described, but only for "plain" Ysabeau: Infant, Office and SC versions seem to work fine.

While, if I install the .otf files, all fonts work fine, with no negative space (at least for what I've seen).

So, as a whole, the problem seems to lie only in the .ttf files (both on Google Fonts and on this repository) for "plain" Ysabeau, while everything else works fine.

Well, in practice this solves the problem for me... I could just use the .oft. Still, I'll give you any additional information you may need, if you want to address the problem somehow. 😃

[CatharsisFonts]

I suspect the reason why Vanilla Ysabeau works differently from the others is that you already had it installed — a font caching issue?

In any case, I'm not getting any undue effects from the GF Ysabeau. Still bears investigating; I've alerted the team responsible for the migration.

[theblursed]

I'm not an expert so I can't say, but before installing the files from the repository I uninstalled the ones from GF exactly to prevent this; and after, I also uninstalled the .ttf of the repository before installing the .oft ones.

[yanone]

This is a known rendering bug in older MacOS versions. It can only be circumvented by redrawing the outlines in a way that each glyph is composed of just one contour (on the outside, more contours for countershapes), with corners as shown in the image below (or overlaps completely removed).

There is a workaround to flag in the font to the MacOS renderer that a particular glyph needs special attention and then they will use another rasterizer for that glyph, but it will significantly slow down the rendering. Combined with fact that the issue has been solved in newer MacOS versions (forgot which one right now), and it can be solved in drawing, no one at Google Fonts has been paying much attention to this issue and honestly, I don't think anyone will. We can push an update if you care to redraw the outlines.

[m4rc1e]

@theblursed what version of OS X are you using?

[yanone]

@theblursed A colleague just informed me that you may use the static font files that you can download from Google Fonts as a zip file. They're not variable, but they got their overlaps removed and shouldn't show that behaviour. For variable fonts it's not possible to remove the overlaps programmatically, hence they can only be redrawn as shown above.

[theblursed]

@yanone I understand; I was already using the static version. However, if if the problem is only mine because of older software, no need to worry: as I said, I can use the .otf which seems to work fine. 🙂

@m4rc1e Catalina 10.15.7