More variable fonts nonsense

jo

After a request to add more axes to the previous simple variable fonts tutorial the follow up escalated a bit. Since there are several files I thought it might be better to put them on github.

frederik

this is super cool!

jo

@frederik thank you!

There is one 'issue' that makes it difficult to abstract the code. And I was wondering if this could be implemented differently in drawbot.
when setting the fontVariations the axis tag cannot be a variable:
fontVariations( axisTag = someValue )

It would be quite convenient to do:

myAxis = 'wght' # or whatever
# ... do some stuff with myAxis
# ... and then just place the variable name
fontVariations( myAxis = someValue )

or to just iterate through axes without ever having to type the axistag.

frederik

You can convert a dictionary to keyword arguments:

myVariations = {
    "wght": 100,
    "wdth": 900
}
fontVariations(**myVariations)

similar a list/tuple can be converted to a arguments:

myColor = (1, 0, 1)
fill(*myColor)
stroke(*myColor)
rect(10, 10, 100, 100)

jo

oh, yes!
that is of course a very nice solution.
will update some of the scripts in the next days.
thanks!

frederik

listFontVariations() returns a (ordered) dict that can be adapted and reused as **keyword arguments while applying the font variations.

Christine

Are you able to run that code in Drawbot? The import from helper_functions doesn’t seem to work (?) @jo

jo

@Christine hello!
I just downloaded the zip from github and did test a few of the scripts in drawbot without any issue. did you change the folder structure and / or do you get an error message? what OS are you using?

Christine

Hoi
I’m using OS 10.13.6, Drawbot says ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'helper_functions'

––– ah, sorry, I just saw that there’s an extra file with the helper functions.