Grades/ Iijl issues

[dberlow]

Roboto Extremo grades, Iijl issues

Grades are required for RobotoExtremo, a san serif with broad opsz, wght and wdth axes, Google “Latin plus” repertoire, and no serifs on I,i,j or l.

Grade range is limited in sans if these glyphs are no-serif designs, without serif alternates. The x direction structure of these glyphs without serifs contain no interior white space, aka counters, and so the inter-character spacing of these glyphs is effected by changes in the grade axes to the detriment to consistent letter spacing.

If a typeface family only has non-serif versions of Iijl, the grade range for every instance in the design space depends on whether there is enough/too much space in the side bearings of these glyphs as the weight shrinks and grows on a given width, to produce grades. Closer to the default is less difficult, the farther down wdth min, the narrower the grade range. The farther up wght max is similar and combinations of wdth min and wght max have narrowed grade ranges.

The options with no serifs:

A movie has been made to help illustrate some of these issues. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gOZiXdTnvK0h3Mg8eU5R2vZB11JD_LWA/view?usp=sharing

A. obey Strict limitation of widths all over the grades of the design space, based on the where the spacing on Iijl fail.

B. Maintain the widths until spacing is untenable, and then “relax” the width restriction for Iijl and allow more grade range on them and the rest of the space. This relaxation goes in both directions, lighter grades of these characters will get narrower widths and bolder grades will get wider widths to protect the spacing over strict grades for Iijl.

The options with alternates, I.e adding Iijl with at least 1 serif each, basically means adding a separate set of widths for those glyphs, and then only if the glyphs are all turned on at once via OT features, the entire design space needs two separate solutions for the grade axis’ limitations:

A. Make stylistic alt that used Use only serif versions of Iijl, (in which case the option is open to use these < e.g. 14 pt in opsz for legibity via gsub and rvrn). Grade ranges expand over the whole space when these alts are turned on by user.

B. Gsub serif versions of Iijl in appropriate grade axes locations to expand the grade range. For the most part, this would expand the lighter range of the grades, e.g. the lighter grades of wide instance, the serif UC I could “grow” serifs to better occupy the additional space opening up in the glyph. If the stylist alts are not turned on, the user would have control only by limiting their grade selection themselves, to where the serifs remain hidden along opsz.

C. A other issues can open up over options.

Note: There are other characters In the repertoire that are affected by this and can't be ignored entirely by some combination of frequency of use, like “|” (vertical bar), and impossible-to-restructure-for-sans-grades-glyphs like “!”.

[davelab6]

A movie has been emailed separately to help illustrate the issue.

Where is it? :)

[dberlow]

I can check my iPhone, which was slowly clouding it, but Chris saw it and solved it. . .

On Thu, Jun 6, 2019 at 2:04 PM Dave Crossland notifications@github.com wrote:

A movie has been emailed separately to help illustrate the issue.

Where is it? :)

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/TypeNetwork/Roboto-Extremo/issues/11?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAO5VDWCVVYFBRW5CVOMDX3PZFGULA5CNFSM4HJCYKG2YY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGODXDVXJA#issuecomment-499604388, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAO5VDRP2BSC5AX4DYZOBCLPZFGULANCNFSM4HJCYKGQ .

[davelab6]

@chrissam42 can this be closed?

[ghost]

This is the first I have heard of this :)

[dberlow]

Sorry this is not a Chris issue I have emailed the movie to Dave separately

[dberlow]

Re-opening this because Dave asked me to write it up as a git issue which I did here.

I have also uploaded the movie to my Google drive and shared it with him to decide where to store it for more general access thanks

[dberlow]

Edited issue description. Published movie.