Which static fonts should be in the Google Fonts downloadable zip?

[m4rc1e]

Google Fonts currently creates static fonts by instantiating all possible axis combinations from a VF. For Fraunces, this means we'll have around 1729 static fonts.

I see you've included a static fonts directory, would you prefer us to use these style combinations instead for the downloadable static fonts? We may still end up deriving the static fonts from the VF but we can limit the amount of generated static fonts based on what's in this dir.

Another option is to highlight the rows in the linked spreadsheet

[arrowtype]

Please note that there is an open PR (#253) which will introduce a slightly modified set of statics from what is in the current static directory in this repo.

FWIW, the static instances are detailed in the static designspaces: Roman and Italic.

I’m including this in an email as well, but for easy reference:

• We don’t need so many Optical Sizes. The Fraunces repo just uses 9pt, 72pt, and 144pt. Also, I believe we should use the designer-specified Optical Sizes, rather than numbers that happen to be in the fallback descriptions right now. Any pt size should be acceptable, if that is what the designer designed for.
• Fraunces excludes ExtraLight, Medium, and ExtraBold (wght 200, 500, 800) instances. See the minisite for a good visualization in the “Thank you for shopping with us” section.
• This uses opsz=144.0 as the default, elided name instances. However, we have changed the default opsz to 9, in part on the recommend of a FontBakery check that says the default should be between 9–14 (or something close to that).
• The SOFT axis has been updated. SOFT=0 is now the default, with the elided name “Sharp.” Others are “Soft” (SOFT=50) and “SuperSoft” (SOFT=100). So, that will result in different postscript names.
• This includes WONK=0.0 instances, which are excluded from the upstream’s statics. Somewhat similar to Recursive’s CRSV axis, this is an axis to tweak another axis’s rvrn behavior, rather than something worth generating extra static instances for.
  • (Additionally, the names are listed as “Normal,” though I hope this will change to either “NonWonky” or “Formal”. But they shouldn’t be included as static outputs, so this is probably irrelevant.)

[thlinard]

* Fraunces excludes ExtraLight, Medium, and ExtraBold (wght 200, 500, 800) instances.

The API doesn't exclude them https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fraunces (issue google/fonts#3411).