STAT FVAR check: Font families with Italic styles should have an ital axis

Should be triggered if “Italic” is part of the file name, or NameID2, or NameID17. The ticked cases indicates where you can already find it.

Ital axis should be set in STAT table

<AxisTag value="ital"/>

Profile

• in google-font profile
• in universal profile
• in opentype profile

Format

• in VF check
• ~in static check~

Initial issue posted:

Observed behaviour

I have this Fontbakery fail :

Check correctness of STAT table strings
* [com.google.fonts/check/STAT_strings](https://font-bakery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/fontbakery/profiles/universal.html#com.google.fonts/check/STAT_strings)

On the STAT table, the _Italic_; keyword must not be used on AxisValues for
variation axes other than _ital_.

 **FAIL** The following AxisValue entries on the STAT table should not contain "Italic":
 ['Thin Italic', 'ExtraLight Italic', 'Light Italic', 'Italic', 'Medium Italic', 'SemiBold Italic', 'Bold Italic', 'ExtraBold Italic', 'Black Italic', 'Thin Italic', 'ExtraLight Italic', 'Light Italic', 'Italic', 'Medium Italic', 'SemiBold Italic', 'Bold Italic', 'ExtraBold Italic', 'Black Italic'] [code: bad-italic]

Expected behaviour

Uprights and italics are separated in 2 variable fonts. Therefore there is no ital axis and the word ‘italic’ is only used to describe the instances name. But I have a poor experience with STAT table so I actually don’t know if it is a bug from Fontbaky, from Fontmake or the build script.

Resources and exact process needed to replicate

Report and fonts can be found in this PR : Epilogue-PR12

[m4rc1e]

I’ve nearly finished writing an update to our STAT table generator. Special thank you to @thlinard who has been reviewing the output.

[punchcutter]

Ideally you would have an ital axis in both fonts set to 0 in the Upright and 1 in the Italic. Like the check above says there shouldn’t be ‘Italic’ in the axis value names of the Italic STAT table. They should have the same names as the Upright. ‘Italic’ should also be defined as the elidable name in the Italic STAT table. That way software that understands STAT tables can generate the proper name based on these settings.

I see this STAT table is coming from a hack in gftools to take the values from the fvar, but the information that can be shared with fvar is limited. The fvar should have instances named as users expect to see them in the named instance pulldown menu. STAT should only provide the building blocks for an application to synthesize a name on the fly and/or provide other information or UI elements which don’t exist yet. For now I suggest creating a ttx STAT stub and inserting it in the build process. We have added STAT support to makeotf and are waiting for fontTools to also implement support for building off of a fea syntax file so we’re getting there, but not quite yet.