Source format available?

[aaronbell]

At current, four glyphs files have been provided (ExtraLight / Regular / Bold / ExtraBold). As GF prefers to ship variable fonts wherever possible, I tried merging these together but found that a vast majority of the glyphs are incompatible (~8304/9354). Would it be possible to get access to the original source format? Or to have these glyphs sources re-generated preserving master compatibility? That way we can build a variable font as desired.

[spring-raining]

After discussions on the possibility of providing the variable fonts, I regret to say that we consider it difficult to do so at this time.

• I assume that the “original source format” here refers to one in which the stroke outlines are not joint, but unfortunately the font vendor who produced LINE Seed JP answered that it is not possible to provide the source format.
• I found that the four glyphs are produced by several font vendors sharing the work (that’s why each font has a different vendor id and version). Therefore, contours are likely to have been optimized and visually tuned using different approaches, and it would be very tough to combine control points while maintaining compatibility.

We very much understand the benefits of providing Variable fonts. If we have the opportunity to update LINE Seed JP in the future, please let us consider this issue.

[aaronbell]

Totally understand the challenge. @davelab6 @chrissimpkins for visibility

Should the sources become available at some point, I'd be happy to help assist with re-integrating the glyph sets.

[davelab6]

@spring-raining no problem :)

I think there is a big opportunity in the near future for CJK variable fonts, thanks to the upcoming changes to OpenType that begin a "variable fonts 2.0" era - with much smaller CJK fonts using "variable components" (discussed in https://github.com/harfbuzz/boring-expansion-spec and within the https://github.com/MPEGGroup/OpenFontFormat community). So, having the source files available to collaborate on such projects is important to Google Fonts.

I would be happy to discuss this in detail with LINE and the font vendors, if you email me (dcrossland@google.com)