[designspace] Additional info for instances

Hi,

I wonder if this idea has come up before, or if there is a way to do it that I don’t know of. If there is, please let me know!

I am wondering if we could extend the concept of localized names for instances sub elements of the <instance> tag to include more kinds of font info.

Say I have a designspace that I am using to generate static instances from. It has an axis other that Weight, Width, and Slope, so I want to make sure I set the WWS names for each of these instances. And more than that, I want to edit the Panose information, or make sure the trademark info has the individual style name in it. None of that stuff interpolates, so the generated instances would get that information from the source at the origin, which may be wrong in this case.

I can adjust these things after the fonts are generated, but it would be cleaner to have the option to declare UFO font info in the instance, maybe even as children of the <info> element to organize them, like so:

...
<instances>
    <instance familyname="My Font" stylename="Text Light" filename="instances/MyFont-TextLight.ufo" postscriptfontname="MyFont-TextLight" stylemapfamilyname="My Font Text Light" stylemapstylename="regular">
        <location>
            <dimension name="optical" xvalue="6"/>
            <dimension name="weight" xvalue="300"/>
        </location>
        <kerning/>
        <info>
            <openTypeNameWWSFamilyName>My Font Text</openTypeNameWWSFamilyName>
            <openTypeNameWWSFamilyName xml:lang="de">Meine Schrift Text</openTypeNameWWSFamilyName>
            <openTypeNameWWSFamilyName xml:lang="fr">Mon Police Texte</openTypeNameWWSFamilyName>
            <openTypeNameWWSSubfamilyName>Light</openTypeNameWWSSubfamilyName>
            <openTypeNameWWSSubfamilyName xml:lang="de">Leicht</openTypeNameWWSSubfamilyName>
            <openTypeNameWWSSubfamilyName xml:lang="fr">Léger</openTypeNameWWSSubfamilyName>
            <openTypeOS2Panose>...</openTypeOS2Panose>
            <trademark>My Font Text Light is a registered trademark...</trademark>
            <trademark xml:lang="de">Meine Schrift Text Leicht ist eine registrierte Marke...</trademark>
            <trademark xml:lang="fr">Mon Police Texte Léger est une marque enregistrée...</trademark>
        </info>
    </instance>
</instances>
...

The idea would be that build tools would take the info in the instance’s <info> tag, and apply it after creating the UFO. Anything explicitly declared in the <info> tag would overwrite whatever info it inherits from the source at the origin.

I have no idea if this has been brought up before, I just thought I would make this issue. If this idea seems feasible, I can make a more formal proposal, and/or take a crack at a PR.

Thanks!

Edit: Just saw #2606, maybe this could work with the <variable-font> element as well.

[anthrotype]

instance elements already have a <lib> which is formated as xml plist, we could define a new public key that stores fontinfo.plist overrides

[belluzj]

I only proposed including them as xml elements because it conceptually fit with the other 5 or so localized name elements

I see; in that case I would say that the pros of the plist format (same as UFO fontinfo.plist) yield more benefits than the pro of following the concept of the rest of the format using proper XML names.

Pros of reusing fontinfo.plist verbatim:

• spec is already written and documented online, key names and value types are all already ironed out
• good, tested code already exists to parse and validate
• lots of example XML to copy-paste from in all the UFOs you already have