More slanted variants - Reverse Italic Oblique, Stronger Slant

[sirinath]

Is it possible to reverse italic and oblique so that the font slants left or backwards? Also, stronger slant variants for document preparation and writing.

[be5invis]

Changing slope will diffidently create a lot of broken shapes... The only slope I've tested is 10°. Mark as needs justification.

[sirinath]

When writing documents some times it is needed to use different formatting elements consistently. Adding a weight to the slant will give an additional dimension in formatting where one can use italic within italics within italics (if there are 3 slants). Back slant along with forward slant can be used for 2 different types of italics.

E.g. the following passage uses English in normal text and Pali in italic. In this case italic-italic is not used but if the English get italicised then the Pali will become italic within italic.

Source document: http://www.themindingcentre.org/dharmafarer/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/3.11-Maha-Rahulovada-S-m62-piya.pdf

[be5invis]

@sirinath There's already Oblique, which lives alongside Italic. You could use Oblique for Pali transliteration and further turn it into Italic.

[sirinath]

If the slant is the same nobody can really tell the difference. Italic, italic-italic, italic-italic-italic, upright italic, back italic, back italic-italic, back italic-italic-italic should be distinguishable for a casual reader. Formatting is to increase clarity. If it cannot be distinguished as different then this is lost.

[be5invis]

If you want more slope levels then I can make this into the backlog. I think slope angles less than 10° should work, but not tested.

[sirinath]

May be following slope angles might be good to have:

• Italics (extra light, light italic, italic, strong italic, extra-strong italic): -20/-17.5, -15/-13, -10/-9, -7.5, -5 (back italics/left-leaning italics); 0 (upright italic); 5, 7.5, 10/9, 15/13, 20/17.5, (italics)
• Oblique: -20/-17.5, -15/-13, -10/-9, -7.5, -5; 5, 7.5, 10/9, 15/13, 20/17.5;

/ means or.

I am not sure it these angles might work but the idea is to have: extra light, light, regular, strong, and extra-strong for left-leaning and right-leaning italics and oblique fonts.

(This is very generic but if there are more variety of fonts for writing it will be good.)

[be5invis]

@sirinath AFAIK there's no well-known names for different slope grades, so it will require creating separate family names. Also, I will probably not make reverse (left-leaning) slopes, since:

• It is super rarely used.
• It may create thousands of broken shapes.

[sirinath]

If italic, italic in italic and italic in italic in italic it is fine.

They can be called: italic, italic-italic (italic in italic), italic-italic-italic (italic in italic in italic).

If you can get the left-leaning italics to work it will be good to have.

Also it would be good to have writing font variants.

[be5invis]

What does "writing font variants" mean? Cursive? It's too far away from Iosevka's style and I will not make it.

[sirinath]

What I meant is you only 3 targeted for writing and documentation: Aile, Etoile, Sparkle. If you have more it will be good as you can expect all other features to work than mixing different fonts. Few variants optimised for screen and also a few optimised for print.

[be5invis]

@sirinath I call them quasi-proportional families Changing slope should work on monospace variants -- though looks a little meaningless... This is a 4.0 goal so it won't be landed soon. And official builds will not contain them: it will only be available in custom builds.

[clsn]

I think the usual printer's convention for using italics inside italics is that they get printed in roman type. I've never seen extra-slanted italics used for that purpose (or any other for that matter.) The classic TeX/Latin Modern unslanted italic is a wonderful violation of expectations, though.

[clsn]

I tried these out... 15° slant is hard to tell from the normal 10°. 20° slant is recognizable. 0° slant on the italic isn't quite as jarring as the Latin Modern Unslanted, but still interesting. -10° slant also came out perfectly fine, if you like that sort of thing. This was all purely fiddling with the values in parameters.toml. (and just the "normal" monospaced regular version, btw)

[be5invis]

Angle customization is now supported. Note that, reverse oblique is currently disabled since it will likely create broken geometry. If you really want to, you can change this line in verdafile.js:

const VlSlopeAngle = { validate: x => x >= 0 && x <= 15 };

into things like

const VlSlopeAngle = { validate: x => x >= -5 && x <= 15 };