Outline overlap present in downloaded webfonts — causing display issue in older Safari versions

[Adam Jagosz]

Fonts that are based on a variable font project (e.g. Inter, Manrope), often contain unresolved path overlaps — in some cases it makes sense (though much less frequently than some type designers claim), as the presence of the overlap changes the way the glyphs are interpolated between weights, and the overlap, for thee most part, does not cause display issues in the browsers that support variable fonts to begin with. It is however desirable to have access to a version of the font that has overlaps removed — e.g. to apply a stroke to the font, or to have it display properly in older browsers (e.g. Safari 13).

It seems to me that the woff2 files downloaded from google-webfonts-helper do not have overlaps removed.

Here's an example (Manrope):

Self-hosted files from google-webfonts-helper:

Served from Google Fonts:

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Note:

To get around the issue, one can downloading the TTFs and convert them to woff2 on their own (using a console tool like fonttools, or an online tool like FontSquirrel or Transfonter).

[David James]

@hyvyys Interesting! Have you by chance looked at the source code? Do you have reason to believe the problem can be found ... (a) in this library?; (b) in an upstream library?