Major changes
-
Add optical sizes (#57)
Source Serif now has six weights across five optical sizes, which increases the
number of styles from 12 to 60. The variable fonts represent this change through
the addition of an opsz axis. -
Shift text master in design space
Source Serif’s interpolation setup was conceived in a time before Variable Fonts
existed, which means that axis coordinates of masters did not necessarily need
to coincide with instance locations. This led to a setup where the Regular style
was defined to be slightly off the location of an intermediate master – simply
because a heavier Regular looked better.
In VF context, this approach was a little problematic, because default masters
are presented in the list of available instances.
In this release, the intermediate master (SourceSerif_1.ufo) was replaced by
the Regular instance, and re-established as a new master.
Effectively, the intermediate master was shifted while increasing its weight.
Ripple effects across the interpolation space (changes of point coordinates,
advance widths, kerning values) are small, but they do exist. -
Change family name (announced in #77)
Adding optical sizes required re-assessment of spacing, proportions, and kerning
decisions in all masters. Additionally, an intermediate master was shifted
to clean up the VF design space.
While care was taken to keep the existing styles largely equivalent to previous
releases, reflow of existing documents is likely.
The “Pro” label originally was attached to OpenType fonts to indicate their
extended language coverage. With Source Serif’s character support far exceeding
former “Pro” standards, this label does not have much meaning anymore.For these reasons, the decision was made to change the family name from
Source Serif Pro to Source Serif 4.
Further fixes
- add Ŋ/ŋ to support Kazakh typesetting in Latin (partly addresses #64)
- fix soft-dotted i/j (addresses #71)
- make the mark feature work for Cyrillic (addresses #72)
- add U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN (addresses #73)
- add f_f_t ligature (addresses #79)
- add all spaces as code points to avoid fallback (addresses #81)
- revise kerning of Small Caps (addresses #83)
- update construction of uhorn & related glyphs to avoid clashes
- space fractions more generously
- update construction of J/J.sc for better spacing