macOS: Google variable fonts

General JUCE discussion
1

Anyone have any experience loading Google variable fonts?

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2

Took a stab at it, works for us.

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3

Nice work!

4

Now that Juce 8 has harfbuzz integrated, is it possible to use variable fonts on all platforms?

5

Not familiar with harfbuzz yet, actually first time I heard about the library was when I was discussing all the upcoming JUCE 8 changes with the team. Looks like there is variable font support in harfbuzz. This is probably a question for @anthony-nicholls or anyone on the JUCE team. We can definitely take a crack at it if it’s not a priority for the JUCE team when we upgrade to JUCE 8.

6

Finally got around to this with harfbuzz.

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7

Thank you for the hard work. I very much hope this can be merged into official JUCE.

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8

Thanks @pflugshaupt - Hope other people find this useful, we really needed it internally because most of the designs coming in now make use of variable fonts. I did see a slight inconsistency between Weight(s) coming from Figma vs harfbuzz (for example wght of 500 in Figma looks too heavy when applying it in harfbuzz) not a big deal but worth noting, I have to set it to 400 to match.

9

This is great! Bump to get this merged into JUCE. The entire font system has been updated and I still have to go in and manually add this into my fork.

10

For anyone reading this in the future: Seems like this was just added to JUCE 8.0.9

11

I don’t think so… Maybe just some of the backend required but there’s no API to actually get the variations as far as I can tell?

12

getFeatureSettings() has been added to juce::Font - not sure whether that supports variable fonts though.

13

Hmm, looks like it could be actually.
I use Google Material Symbols in web views and the properties there are things like:

  'FILL' 0,
  'wght' 300,
  'GRAD' 0,
  'opsz' 24

so looks like these 4-char settings you’d see if the typeface supports and then set them on the Font. Cool stuff. I’ll have to see if it works at some point soon.

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14

We added Font Feature support awhile back. Variable font support is currently being explored.

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