Letter "v" has the wrong font weight in Semibold

[dawe-rgb]

Hi cadsondemak,

thanks for the great font »prompt«! We've used it in a webproject and and we noticed that the small letter »v« has the wrong font weight in semibold. Is there a way you could fix it soon?

Thanks!
Kind regards,
Daniel

[madeinffm]

Hey there! Any news on this?

[kenmcd]

Are you hosting the .woff2 font files on your own server?
Or using Goggle Fonts links?
Trying to get GF to update their hosted fonts is a big process.
But simply fixing these two fonts to use locally is not that big a deal.

[madeinffm]

Hey @kenmcd ,
thanks for your answer. We're hosting them on our own servers, so if you have a new version, that would be super helpful.

Cheers
florian

[kenmcd]

@madeinffm & @dawe-rgb
OK. Give me a few days.
I forked it and opened-up the sources Sat. and they are quite a mess.
For some reason the SemiBold was originally created from a separate master. (also explains the kerning issue)
And the SemiBold lowercase v is the Medium glyph with just wider side bearings. Quite odd.
So the plan is to put the three main masters back together, fix the other issues, and then regenerate all the fonts.
That should also create the SemiBold correctly.

This project appears to be abandoned so I will probably post the new fonts in my fork, or ...
And I will change the name to Prompt 1, still version one features but fixed.
Or maybe I'll add more features and make it Prompt 2 ... dunno.
Makes me crazy when software updates re-install the old un-fixed fonts, so now I always rename them.
And it makes it clear to others that something has changed.

Google Fonts makes at least four different versions of the .woff2 files with different character sets.
To minimize the file size served.
Do you know which ones you are using?
Does the size matter that much to you?
Not really an issue, I will just create .woff2 versions with the full font (which is usual here).

[madeinffm]

Hey @kenmcd,
thank you very much for your detailed answer!!! Super cool!
Size does not matter that much really, I don't expect the full package to be that anyhow.

Looking forward to the files,
cheers
florian

[kenmcd]

The short version ...
SemiBold Regular and Italic fonts with a fixed lowercase v are attached below.
Includes .woff2 and .ttf files.
Do not know why the Prompt-SemiBoldItalic.ttf file is so big. AIDK.
(Ugh, just noticed the file names are kinda off, you can fix.)
Prompt-SemiBold-fonts-fixed.zip

The kerning is still wacko, but the v weight is right.

The long version ...
Wadda mess.
Merged the "source" masters, created the instances for each weight, exported the fonts,
and got a bunch of errors regarding mis-matches in the characters present in each master.
Mostly in the Vietnamese, but also some in the Latin characters.
The resulting fonts were missing the lowercase a and m for example.
So I thought, these are worse than I expected, and need major fixing.
But, the SemiBold lowercase v was there, and it is the right weight.
So I decided to just plug that one character into the original fonts.
That was relatively painless.
So give these a try and let me know how it goes.

Prompt is often mentioned when people are looking for a FOSS alternative to Avenir.
I came here looking for an open source font I can modify to create my own open source extended Avenir replacement.
This looks like it may not be a good candidate.
Dunno.
I'm off. Got other stuff to do ...

[madeinffm]

Hey @kenmcd ,
sorry for the late answer but WOW, thank you very much for your work!!! We'll give it a try! Thank you so much for your efforts! Much appreciated!

Cheers!
Florian

[patricekaufmann]

Hello, thanks for the updated version of the font. The v for sure looks better now :)

However there is a difference compared to the font provided by Google. It's a checkbox that sets a bit for "use typo metrics". The fonts provided by google have this setting unchecked while the improved TTF has it checked which leads to different rendering results in browsers, e.g. small offsets on the glyphs. I used the FontForge editor to manually uncheck this checkbox. Afterwards the font is appearing the same as the one provided by google.

I can provide an image which shows the checkbox, unfortunately it's in german, left old, right new:

Do you happen to know if this is something Google does to all fonts when providing them?

As for file size of the woff and woff2 formats in this ticket: That's most likely a charset thing and the larger woff files contain more glyphs.

Regards,
Patrice

[madeinffm]

Hey @patricekaufmann ,
thanks for your insights!
Cheers,
Florian

[kenmcd]

Do you happen to know if this is something Google does to all fonts when providing them?

Yes, GF does make changes to fix fonts - with no notice or change in version number.
They call them hotfixes, I call them stealth updates.
So they fixed the vertical metrics to meet current guidelines.
And I did not notice.
That is part of the more current GF standards.
Pre-publishing standards which these fonts would never pass today.

In hindsight I should have just started with the fonts, rather than the "sources."
Would have been easier, and quicker, and less error prone.