Just for fun, I’m going ahead and publishing it exactly as is, showing what I was thinking at the time, just after Variable Fonts were announced. OK, this is kind of funny: a post I wrote in November 2016 that languished in my “drafts” afterwards when I was busy with work, waiting on illustrations/graphics that I never did add. add yours » Third time’s the charm? Why OpenType Font Variations (variable fonts) will likely succeed where predecessors failed. (Don’t miss the options for other languages, and more!) If you are doing browser-based font testing-or font testing anywhere, really-with an incomplete character set, consider Miguel Sousa’s Adhesion Text to get useful words for test purposes. Pablo Impallari’s tester, as hosted by Cyreal.You can drag the font into a browser window and test it there. If you don’t have to test in a desktop app, you can avoid a lot of grief! There are sites for testing fonts in a web browser. □ But you don’t have to worry about caching and conflicts! □ Remember that your existing docs won’t recognize this as being the same font family.Before generating the actual TTF or OTF font, increment a build number at the end of the font family name.But if I am in the midst of frequent font revisions, it also means I can swap out font versions constantly, as often as I like, and not worry in the least about my apps or OS getting confused. And it has to be changed before releasing the font. Sure, this has its limitations, as the new font won’t just automatically substitute for the old one in existing documents. I leave it this way as long as possible during development. I also put it on the end of the file name. That’s why as a font designer, I sometimes work with a system where instead of keeping the internal names the same, I actually put the build version number right at the end of the gosh-darned family name, so it shows in the menu with the version number. ![]() Option 1 seem like too much freakin’ work? Or you need something that works on Windows, or reboots suck? I hear you. Option 3: Font Naming Tricks (cross-platform) Yay for SSDs!) Upside: if your system font caches have gotten messed up, or you don’t want to go through all the steps above, it becomes the simplest solution. (Also, Mac restarts used to take longer than they do nowadays. That’s why I ended up tending to go with Option 1. I’ve used it occasionally, and it works fabulously. It’s available through major utility aggregators like MacUpdate and CNet. FontNuke is a Mac utility that clears font caches, and then reboots your system. I forgot about this option for a while, but was reminded of it by James Montalbano in a thread on TypeDrawers.
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