1492789 - Variable axes on "Inter UI" don't work

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect, P3)

Description

[Martin Balfanz [:mbalfanz]]

Attachment: Screenshot_2018-09-20 12.33.56_EQnRO2.png

On the font "Inter UI" changes to the axes don't change the font rendering.  Also, the variable axes don't show up in our DevTools.

This is true for both DevEdition and Nightly.

In addition, there are some "white spots" in the rendering that are not present in Chrome.  Please see the screenshot attached to see both effects. (Nightly on the left and Chrome Canary on the right)

STR:
1. Visit v-fonts.com and scroll down to Inter UI
2. Play around with the sliders on the page
3. Open DevTools and select the font

ER:
- Changes to sliders on the page should change the font
- Variable axes should appear in devtools

AR:
- Changes to font-variation-settings through slider or devtools does not affect the font rendering
- Axes don't show up in devtools

Comment 1

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

The web console indicates that Inter UI has a bad Glyph Variations table:

downloadable font: gvar: Glyph count mismatch (font-family: "Inter UI" style:normal weight:400 stretch:100 src index:0) source: https://v-fonts.com/assets/fonts/Inter-UI.var.woff2

Sure enough, attempting to decompile the font with TTX also indicates problems:

ERROR: An exception occurred during the decompilation of the 'gvar' table
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/fonttools/3.26.0/libexec/lib/python2.7/site-packages/fontTools/ttLib/ttFont.py", line 391, in __getitem__
    table.decompile(data, self)
  File "/usr/local/Cellar/fonttools/3.26.0/libexec/lib/python2.7/site-packages/fontTools/ttLib/tables/_g_v_a_r.py", line 98, in decompile
    assert len(glyphs) == self.glyphCount
AssertionError
Dumping 'gvar' table...

So, broken font resource.

The latest release on https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases no longer seems to have this issue, so ideally v-fonts.com should update the version they're using. I've emailed Nick Sherman to ask for this to be fixed.

Comment 2

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

See bug 1547409. Moving webcompat whiteboard tags to keywords.

Comment 3

[Raul Bucata]

I was not able to reproduce the issue. The changes to the font are applied when the slider is moved, as expected, although the Font has been replaced with Inter instead of Inter UI, but the variable axes are not present on both Chrome and Firefox when using the DevTools:

https://media.giphy.com/media/dru4x8XmiiZUhE8cwy/giphy.gif

Reporter, can you confirm, please?

Tested with:

Browser / Version: Firefox Nightly 101.0a1 (2022-04-27) (64-bit) / Chrome Version Version 101.0.4951.41 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Operating System: Windows 10 PRO x64

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

It looks like the v-fonts.com site is no longer deploying the broken font version, so this works as expected now.