![]() ![]() ![]() Here’s a table of the instances designed for the font, illustrating the intended subfamilies: Instead, it is much simpler to think of as four sub-families (Sans Casual, Sans Linear, Mono Casual, & Mono Linear), each with a range of weight & italics. Not only does that cause practical issues of file handling & text layout, but it also isn’t a very useful way to break down this family. Weight is used as the principle/only sorting category.(Then again, even though Mac allows all instances to be installed, only a few are actually selectable, so it’s a tossup of what’s worse.) This is perhaps even worse on Windows, where the repeated names make it impossible to install all of the static instances at the same time.In Figma, the issue is similar to Adobe apps, though it is a different arbitrary seven styles that are available.In Sketch, for example, the menu appears to show a bunch of "Regular" styles all selected at the same time: ![]() There are also problems in other apps.In Adobe apps, this style naming results in just seven available styles, which aren’t even in a consistent subfamily, making them totally confusing and more or less impossible to use together.In Font Book, styles are marked as duplicates, and "Resolve Automatically" deletes all but one of each weight. The font metadata only uses weight descriptors in style names, which disrupts macOS Font Book, as well as font menus in many or all apps.Instead, the downloads from Google Fonts specify the weight first, then axis values, which are hard to understand without a fairly deep knowledge of the font, such as Recursive-Black-CASL=0-CRSV=1-MONO=0-slnt=0.ttf. They should do something to include the instance names, such as RecursiveMonoCslSt-BlkItalic.otf (an abbreviated form used in the Recursive releases – possibly, it would be even better with less abbreviation). Issues include Filenamesįilenames are confusing. I know this approach may not work for every family, but the Recursive statics have been specifically engineered by Ben Kiel, a type engineer with years of experience, so it would be worth making an exception to use the higher-quality fonts until the auto-generated instances can perform as well. Until this can be resolved, I propose that we replace the current, auto-generated fonts with the statics available from the official Recursive releases. And, many popular design tools currently work best with static fonts – exporting variable fonts to PDFs is flaky, and variable fonts aren’t yet supported at all in Figma. This is a particular problem because many designers would be likely to use static fonts to design a website or app before then using Google Fonts to provide the fonts on the web. The static fonts for Recursive that are available via the "Download Family" function of the Recursive specimen on Google Fonts have several issues that make them very unuseful in most contexts. ![]()
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