1559820 - A variable font I created does not appear to change when I animate along an unregistered axis.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[david]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.1.1 Safari/605.1.15

Steps to reproduce:

Use CSS keyframes to animate along a custom variable axis using the Input Cipher font (my own design, unreleased).

The font uses feature variations stored in the 'rvrn' feature. It does not seem to matter if the 'rvrn' feature is manually set in the CSS.

Demo: https://codepen.io/djrrb/pen/oOvjxG

Actual results:

The font does not change in appearance as the axis value changes.

Demo: https://codepen.io/djrrb/pen/oOvjxG

Expected results:

On load and on hover, the glyphs in the font should have changed in appearance as the axis value increases. The font does not interpolate but uses feature variations found in the font. In my tests, the font appears to work in Chrome, Safari, FontView, Adobe Illustrator, etc. I believe it also worked in previous versions of Firefox though I cannot confirm this.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:dholbert, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 2

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Attachment: screen capture (low-res, sorry) showing behavior

David, this seems to work for me, AFAICT (on macOS 10.13.6): when the mouse enters or leaves the text area, the glyphs "scramble" in response to the variation-axis animation, eventually settling back to the "proper" characters. Is there something I'm missing?

Comment 3

[david]

Thanks for your response Jonathan, and apologies for a possible false alarm!

What you described is exactly what is supposed to happen. Also running macOS 10.13.6, I am getting a different result where nothing happens when the variation-axis is changed or animated. I’m not sure how to upload screencasts here, but this is what I see when I drag the axis in the FF inspector: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVfuLuAxhZo

I confirmed with a friend that it is also not working as expected on their machine, running macOS 10.14.5 and firefox 67.0.4.

Do you have any ideas why it might work for you and not us? Happy to provide more info if I can. Again, many thanks.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Kew [:jfkthame]]

Hmm. Looks like something may indeed be broken in v67. I'm normally running Firefox Nightly; but just now I also checked Firefox Beta (68), and it works for me there.

Further testing indicates that this was fixed when we updated harfbuzz to v2.4.0 in bug 1540770. It's not immediately clear to me what specific harfbuzz change was relevant here, but given that Firefox 68 is so close to release at this point, it's probably not worth spending the time to dig further; the issue is fixed in current versions.

If you could give Firefox 68 beta (see https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/) a try and confirm that it does indeed fix the problem for you, that'd be helpful -- thanks!

Comment 5

[david]

Confirming that this works great for me in the beta (68.0b14). I look forward to publishing the font once 68 is released.

Thank you again for your help! Feel free to resolve this bug as you see fit.

Comment 6

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

Calling this FIXED by bug 1540770 then. Thanks!