Inter variable doesn't currently show as multiple weights in MS Word

[thundernixon]

Describe the bug

In builds of the latest version of Inter, the upright variable font doesn't display multiple instances in Microsoft Word, as variable fonts should:

Environment:

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Build Inter Variable
2. Load into Windows 10
3. Access in Word

Expected behavior
A variable font's named instances should appear in the MS Word font menu as multiple, separate fonts.

Environment

• Windows 10 (VMWare Fusion)
• MS Word v 1901 (Office 365)
• Inter Variable 3.4 at 20aaab6

Additional context

This is probably fixable with gftools fix-vf-meta. I'll try this and close the issue if so.

[rsms]

70f3df7 adds gftools "fix-vf-meta" as a post-processing step to zip distributions. Since it modifies the files, and requires multiple file inputs, it's tricky to integrate into Make, which is why it as added as a post-processing step.

"fix-vf-meta" only supports single-axis VF at the moment, so the affected files are:

• Inter-upright.var.woff2
• Inter-italic.var.woff2
• Inter-upright.var.ttf
• Inter-italic.var.ttf

I've attached the result from make zip here:
Inter-3.4-35a23627a5.zip

Since I don't have Microsoft Office (Word) on my Windows machine, it would be great if you could test this, @thundernixon :–)

[thundernixon]

😶 I should have realized that fix-vf-meta that was all that was needed. Nice work! It's better to have it in the build, anyway. In fact, it might make sense to also include fix-gasp and fix-dsig, as I've also put these into my QA move-check script, but they would make more sense in a build flow. Then again, I'm less certain of the benefit of these vs fix-vf-meta, so it may not be as important.

Good news: the weight-axis-only variable fonts now work in MS Word!

Style-linking (Regular to Bold) also works well.

Note: the font names are sorting in a slightly unintuitive way (alphabetical, by name), but this is a more general problem with Word and variable fonts, and not something we've found a way to fix on the font side. So, this issue is closed!

[apollolux]

Hello! I just attempted to install a variable version of Inter 3.11 and am getting this issue with the non-single axis files. Also, for some reason Win10 isn't letting me install both the roman and italic single axis files at the same time, but that's probably a slightly different issue.

I encountered this issue with tonsky/FiraCode#770 , almost certainly due to the build process, and the workaround for that seemed to be to export it directly from Glyphs rather than fonttools/gftools/whatever since it seems the build tool isn't properly setting the instance names in the final file.

Should I actually file this as a new bug or is it ok to piggyback this very related issue?