Confirm axis defaults

[davelab6]

@sponcey please could you confirm these default values?

axis	default	default name
wght	400	Regular
opsz	72	72 pt
SOFT	0	Sharp
WONK	0	Normal

[sponcey]

Are these new values? I thought we had agreed on:

Optical Size	opsz	9pt to 144pt	144pt	Labeled 9pt, 72pt, and 144pt in instances.
Weight	wght	100 to 900	900	Labeled Thin, Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, and Black in instances.
Softness	SOFT	000 to 100	100	Labeled S000, S050, and S100 in instances.
Wonky	WONK	0 to 1	1	Binary axis controls substitution of "wonky" characters. Automatically substitutes when opsz > 18. Not listed in instances.

[arrowtype]

Weight

@davelab6, unless you are suggesting specifically interpolating & adding sources at wght=400, the wght default must either be 100 or 900. Currently, it is 900. Please let me know if GF has decided to now require a 400 wght default.

Optical Size

We may need to make the default opsz 9pt to:

• avoid this issue: Opsz bug in Firefox #208
• align with the fontbakery check com.google.fonts/check/varfont/regular_opsz_coord, which expects the “Regular” instance in fvar to have an opsz in the range of 9 to 13

Softness

I believe there was agreement (at #209) to use the names Sharp, Soft, and ExtraSoft.

However, it seems that Dave is expecting the SOFT axis to default to 0/Sharp, while @sponcey & @flaviazim are expecting it to default to 100/ExtraSoft. This is a significant difference, because whatever the default is will be the (only) thing to show up on the Google Fonts website. Also, it will appear in the styles with elided (not shown) style names – e.g. it will be the normal “Fraunces” to most people.

See #186 for a list of the styles resulting if we keep the current naming & scale – basically, Sharp becomes the default.

And so, if the default should be soft according to @sponcey & @flaviazim but @davelab6 & Google Fonts expect axis defaults to be 0, we probably need to change the naming here. For example, if softness is the default and going to 100 makes it sharper, the axis should be called Sharpness (SHRP), and have instance names like [Soft] (elided), Blunt, and Sharp.

Should we make the change to SHRP? Or let Sharp be the default & elided style?

Wonky

I agree with @sponcey at google/fonts#2741 that this axis should have the name Wonky. Are we all aligned on this, including @davelab6?

[arrowtype]

Oh wait; one further question on the Wonky axis:

If the default is WONK=1 or “Wonky,” I assume that name should be left out of (AKA elided from) the “composed name” that comes from the STAT table.

However, the current Axis Definition for WONK says that the non-Wonky name is “Normal.” This doesn’t really make much sense in a composed name, because “Normal” doesn’t say much about the style if it is in a name and is used in other similar axes, notably Italic.

Questions:

• Should the default of WONK really be Wonky/1?
• Would you be willing to reconsider? This axes acts a bit like the Italic axis, and that expects Italic to default to 0. The same goes for axes like Casual, Monospace, and Cursive in Recursive.
• If you do really want WONK to default to Wonky, what should the name be for WONK=0? “NonWonky”?

[arrowtype]

Okay, here is the strategy I am taking, for reasons mentioned above & in emails.

axis	default	default name	name elided
wght	900	Black	no
opsz	9	9pt	no
SOFT	0	[Sharp]	yes
WONK	1	[Wonky]	yes

If this doesn’t work, I can do another round later to fix things.

[arrowtype]

Ugh, I’m experiencing a lot of doubt here because I want to try to preserve the design intent, especially after spending some more time with the web specimen.

One alternative that might work:

• The SOFT (Softness) axis defaults to 100, and has styles [Soft], SemiSoft, and Sharp Not doing this, as @sponcey has made it fairly clear that he prefers "Soft"-based naming
• The WONK (Wonky) axis defaults to 1, and has styles [Wonky] and NonWonky. However, if the opsz default is 9pt, I don’t think WONK=1 does anything. I am doing this; table updated above

The opsz axis still needs to keep 9pt as the default style – mostly so that the basic-name fonts to align between Google Fonts and the Fraunces repo releases. If we want a 72pt default, we would have to generate 72pt sources in the build process. I will first work on making things work according to existing standards (as shown in my table above). But, if we truly want this to be a display-first font, this 72pt default would be worth pursuing along with the alternative names in this comment, above.