Family name

[zertyuiop]

I do not know if this was planned, but after building Literata 3, each font file has its own family name, different for each file. I use Literata as the default font on my e-book, and I cannot use the compiled font files without first changing the family name.

[josescaglione]

Can you please share some more information?

How do you see family names listed?
Is there any style linking at all (eg. Literata light and Literata Light Italic)?
What device and operating system are you using?

Many thanks,
J.-

[davelab6]

How did you build the fonts? :)

[zertyuiop]

For build, I used virtual machines with Fedora and Ubuntu. On Ubuntu, I used the fonttools, fontmake, woff-tools, woff2 packages from the Ubuntu repository, and gftools from PyPI. On Fedora, I used woff-tools and woff2 from the repository and fontmake, fonttools and gftools from PyPI. I used FontForge to view font information, it shows the family name, it is different for each file, there is no linking (Literata Light and Literata Light Italic have their own family names, and not the same, Literata Light for the linking to work).

[zertyuiop]

I also noticed that there is a problem with the size in the font name. Some applications/devices cannot normally use fonts with this name (confirmed on Kobo eReader and CoolReader for Android). At the same time, if I rename a font using FontForge (for example, Literata 12pt to Literata), these devices and applications work normally with such a font. Perhaps it is worth adding the ability to build a font with the name "Literata" without size, for use in such situations?

[zertyuiop]

I want to note that renaming to Literata 12 or Literata 3 gives nothing, fonts still have problems. In this case, for example, the Exo 2 font works fine.

[zertyuiop]

Another note: font subfamily name and style is always Regular.

[kokoshneta]

Having just finally managed to build the static fonts on MacOS (using the supplied build script), I can reproduce this, at least part of it.

All the variants do have the same family name, but their style groups are messed up – each file is the Regular variant in its own style group, as shown in this screenshot (from Font Explorer X):

I tried manually fixing the style groups with TransType 4, but the fonts that generates have weird errors where the diacritics in the polytonic Greek capitals are incorrectly placed, sometimes even appearing as negative space on top of the letter itself.

[kokoshneta]

Digging around a bit more, this seems to have been caused by some incorrect and missing values in the .designspace files. Neither of the two files had any of the styleMapFamilyName and styleMapStyleName attributes for any of the instances, which are needed to create style groups; and both of them also had some instances with errors in them (for some reason particularly the medium weights).

I’ve managed to get both fixed so the fonts created are correctly style-grouped, though I did it by manually editing the XML in the .designspace files. The instances which contained errors are all missing a <lib> node, but I don’t know what exactly those actually do and couldn’t figure out what values they ought to contain where they were missing, so I left them out. The fonts still built correctly.

[kokoshneta]

Added pull request #22 with the edited .designspace files.