Am 2020-08-24 14:49, schrieb Nathan Willis:
Also, Pango and GTK support them in addition to the packages mentioned earlier, and there was some work showcased that exploited the variation feature as a UI/UX element, such as having text labels in GTK widgets grow bolder upon mouseover, so eventually I would expect them to become the norm.
Does LibreOffice already support them? How are they presented in the font chooser?
It is possible to use update-alternatives to offer users a choice in this sort of situation? I am actually curious what the community temperature is about that as an approach — if it causes more confusion that it does solutions, or if it's regarded as an extreme-measures type of packaging tactic.
Please don't add this level of complexity and required user interaction to font packaging! If you consider it useful to package variable fonts, let them just be in a separate package and have this conflict with the one containing the regular font files. This is the most straightforward solution and easy to implement - and it also communicates clearly that variable fonts are not supplementary to regular fonts but that it's one format or the other.
I 100% support making variable fonts the default; I only ask about fallback approaches.
Sounds like an interesting approach, sure! - Fabian