How to re-export/modify Inter to set some alternate characters as default?

[yusuphgammut]

Hey, first of all congratulations and thanks for v4 of Inter, its just awesome!

I'd like to know if there is a (preferably quick) way to re-export or modify Inter so that it has some alternate characters as default characters. Let's say I want to re-export Inter (both roman and italic) to generate variable, OTF, TTF, and WOFF2 files that have the alternate uppercase "I", lowercase "L", lowercase "U", and open numbers "6" and "9" as default. How can I do that?

I'm starting to explore the Glyphs app so I don't know if it is possible via the Glyphs interface in the font properties dialog window, or maybe a python script. I'd appreciate any ideas.

[iKL3W]

Hi ! Same question here! So many configurations and it's hard to want to stick to the default version without trying other configurations. On Microsoft Word you can change some "stylistic sets" but it's just a bunch of 20 unnamed configurations that change a parameter (e. g. "l", "0") and it's quite limiting. Could there be an update to change this behaviour at least in Word? or would there be a way to download the fonts with the parameters we want? or a way to change our default settings when the font is downloaded (btw I'm on Mac)?

Also, great job on the new version, I love it even more ! Thanks.

[Pogimon3]

You can use Opentype Feature Freezer for doing this.
Get the feature names from here: https://rsms.me/inter/#features

[iKL3W]

can we use it with multiple fonts (weights) at once? Because 8 weights for 3 fonts is quite a long task.

[yusuphgammut]

Thanks @Pogimon3 . I'll give it a try and I'll let you know.

[Pogimon3]

You can use it on the variable version of the font file. It will generate a variable version with the features frozen. You can then use a python script to generate different weights from (should be straightforward)

[iKL3W]

The commands for installing the font is to open "Inter.ttc", "InterVariable.ttf" and "InterVariable-Italic.ttf" but Opentype Feature Freezer doesn't seem to work for "Inter.ttc":

INFO: [RemapByOTL] Running with options: Namespace(features='ss01,ss03,cv06,cv08,cv05', info=False, inpath='/Users/username/Downloads/Inter-4.0/Inter.ttc', lang=None, names=True, outpath=None, replacenames='', report=False, script=None, suffix=False, usesuffix='', verbose=True, zapnames=False)
WARNING: [_openFontTTX] TTX cannot open /Users/username/Downloads/Inter-4.0/Inter.ttc: specify a font number between 0 and 35 (inclusive)
WARNING: Errors during processing.
INFO: [RemapByOTL] Running with options: Namespace(features='ss01,ss03,cv06,cv08,cv05', info=False, inpath='/Users/username/Downloads/Inter-4.0/Inter.ttc', lang=None, names=True, outpath=None, replacenames='', report=False, script=None, suffix=False, usesuffix='', verbose=True, zapnames=False)
WARNING: [_openFontTTX] TTX cannot open /Users/username/Downloads/Inter-4.0/Inter.ttc: specify a font number between 0 and 35 (inclusive)
WARNING: Errors during processing.

Is there a fix for that error, or do we go through with it without changing this one file?

Thanks for your response.

[Pogimon3]

TTC is a relatively new format. Don’t think Opentype Feature Freezer supports is yet. You’ll have to freeze features for the inter variable ttf file and the inter display ttf files separately

[andreaippo]

Chiming in here because I found myself in a similar situation. I was successful with Opentype Feature Freezer, e.g.

pyftfeatfreeze -n -f cv01,cv02,cv03,cv04,cv05,cv06,cv08,cv09,tnum,calt,case -S -U custom InterDisplay-Light.otf InterDisplay-custom.otf

But that's not the point. The point is, if you want to extract a specific font from a ttc file, you can use fontTools which is a nifty little python app.

pipx install fonttools

Then use the ttx module.

E.g.

#!/bin/bash
for VARIABLE in {0..35}
do
    ttx -y $VARIABLE Inter.ttc -o Inter-$VARIABLE.ttx && ttx Inter-$VARIABLE.ttx
done

This will dump all the fonts contained in that ttc file to a ttx file. Each of these ttx files are then dumped to ttfs.

I haven't tried dumping directly to ttf with -o Inter-$VARIABLE.ttf, it might work as well and save you a command (and some time).

How do I know indexes are 0 to 35? The error message of the OpenType Feature Freezer said so:
specify a font number between 0 and 35 (inclusive)

Alternatively, yeah, just pull the release zip which contains them all as separate files as well.

This trick could be useful for general ttc manipulation, maybe for other fonts that don't distribute the individual versions as otfs or ttfs.

[kenmcd]

The release package already includes the individual TTF files in the extras folder.
Those are the same fonts as in the TTC file.