Weight Axis variable font

[pichotta]

@skosch
Fonthausen
@m4rc1e

Hello Sebastian and Jacques,

As you may know, the Google fonts team would love to see a variable fonts version of ‘Crimson'. They have commissioned us @TypeNetwork to work on upgrading a number of font projects to be variable fonts with a single weight axis.

We wish to begin by finding out the current status of this family and then by making a fork off of this git repository.

I see from the 'Forks' that there is a 'CrimsonPro' update in progress. Is this the data that we should use to make the family compatible? or, should we use .sfd font format found on this repo? I know that one consideration is the amount of possible regression with what fonts are currently being served at fonts.google.com

Thank you in advance for sharing any information and directing us to the most current sources and/or contributors : )

A little bit about the process...

In order to achieve the highest quality and most efficient long term results we will be converting the source data from Glyphs to UFO. The new source data will be generated in the RoboFont environment using fontmake and ttfautohint. There has been progress on tools to make an easy path to move between the Glyphs and Robofont environment.

During the process we will be looking to improve any errors while preserving how the font appears and renders on different platforms.

The upgrade will be completed for you in the near future. When the proposed final font is approved by Google they will accept a pull request.

We hope this answers some of your questions. Please let us know if you have any additional comments.

Best Regards,

Jill Pichotta
Vice President
Type Network
pichotta@typenetwork.com

[skosch]

Hi Jill,
That's great news! As outlined in the README file of this repo, there are currently 3.5 versions of Crimson. The oldest one is what Google Fonts offers as "Crimson Text", the second one is available on GF as the Latin part of "Amiri", and the latest one is Jacques' "Crimson Pro" (a slight variant of which is found in my "CrimsonProS" repo). You'll probably want to start with Crimson Pro's files, and direct any questions to @Fonthausen :)