Variations fonts and OpenType 1.8

Variations fonts and OpenType 1.8

There's not really a connection. Metafont supported variate-able parameters, but as the variables in a parametric equation. The differences between Metafont and outline fonts are too great in other respects.

Font designers have been interested in variations for quite a long time; they have simply distributed them as sets of individual font files. In recent years a lot of work has been done on the font-editor side of things to make creating interpolatable masters easier and to make generating instances from those masters more reliable, too. In a sense, the variations-font work is a straight extension of that trend, moving it from a build-time process to a run-time process.

Nate