Add Stylistic Alternate Glyphs: a, t, y to Inter Text

[Derpitron]

Lowercase a with horizontal terminal.

Left: My alternate, Right: Original glyph

Lowercase t with straight tail.

Left: My alternate, Right: Original glyph

Lowercase y with straight tail

Left: My alternate, Right Original glyph

These stylistic alternates have corresponding character variant feature files, and I have created a new stylistic set ss05, for "straight tailed characters", including l.ss02, t.ss05, and y.ss05.

I have designed these glyphs in Fontlab 7 for Windows, and exported to .glyphs format using the program's inbuilt exporter. However, I have noticed that attempting to build from this glyphs file using the Inter toolchain fails, as Fontlab's exporter seems to mis-generate certain sections of the files, e.g missing delimiters. It is too tedious of a process for me to find these malformed sections and manually correct them, and it is not possible for me to use the Glyphs app, as neither do I have access to a Mac, nor do I have a Glyphs license.

I am able to generate .ufo files through FontLab 7, but I have not committed them to my fork as it may disrupt your repository structure.

This PR essentially closes #152, a feature request I made years ago.

This is my first pull request to this repository, and my first time modifying the Inter font.

[Derpitron]

I managed to fix my .glyphs file using a text editor! This should rectify any formatting errors, though it is tedious to do it by hand. Now that I know that the issue is caused by my font designing software, and not my fault, it will still be tedious to re-edit the .glyphs file manually, but now I know the specific issues to look out for.

[Derpitron]

i am genuinely curious, why no new commits have been made to Inter since June, not even patches, nor responses to issues/PRs by the maintainers. If the maintainers are feeling burnt out by too much workload, it would be helpful to say so to the community 😃

[ThomasRettig]

@Derpitron apparently, Rasmus said on Twitter recently that he hasn't been in the mood to create/maintain any projects. To my understanding, he also seems to be working on other bigger projects, such as Playbit. 🤷

[Derpitron]

Oh, that's understandable.

[TaigaYamada]

Thank you very much for this contribution!

I've been wanting a horizontal terminal version of lowercase "a" for some time now, but didn't have the tools/experience to cut a letter myself.

@Derpitron could you consider a vertical terminal version of lowercase "t" and "y" as well? (Currently inter has angled terminal for these)

[Derpitron]

hey Taiga, thanks for the kind words! I feel as though a straight terminal "t" and "y" would be too hard to distinguish from the original designs, be it at small sizes or large sizes. But I feel that my straight terminal "a" design would be more distinguishable at larger sizes, e.g for large body copy.

I considered making a straight terminal variant when I just started designing, but then I would have to make alternate glyphs for not just "t" and "y", but for a lot of other glyphs across not just Latin but also Greek and Cyrillic character sets.

While I was thinking of this problem, it reminded me of the Iosevka font, where all the glyphs are not designed, but rather generated by code, which allows for elements such as terminal styles and curves to be customized across the entire glyph set, as well as tailored for individual characters. However, such a technique is not possible for the manually designed Inter font.

[rsms]

Hello and thank you for the offering. Really nice work. However there's a personality to any font and I fear adding these alternates would make Inter less "Inter" and more of a "a little bit of everything."

I have two suggestions:

1. If you are interested specifically in contributing to Inter, the Display font has a lot of glyph work to be done. Like, hundreds of glyphs. Working on that would be impactful (let me know if you want to do this and I can come up with a list of glyghs already done in Display.) I've updated CONTRIBUTING.md with information.
2. If you dream of Inter looking & feeling differently, create your own fork of Inter where you can change the style completely freely to make it your own

Thank you for understanding!

[Derpitron]

It was fun working on this font, and even if it isn't merged with the original, it was a fun hobby for me to work on. I loved the community's approval of my work. I will continue to work on my own fork of this font alongside yours, and any bug fixes I will contribute upstream. Thank you!

[rsms]

Lovely! Looking forward to seeing a what you create!