Typeface "Inter" is missing italics

[genericusername3]

Description

When using the web app to write a document, the typeface Inter does not provide italics even though there are italic font variants.

Maybe this is related to Google Fonts listing Inter as nine separate weights with no oblique variants, although Inter is actually a variable font that defines weight and slant as separate axes. As such, it should be able to provide italics for functions like emph

Reproduction URL

https://typst.app/project/rtK5d78zM8nS7QeWEN5dGA

Browsers

No response

OS

No response

[genericusername3]

For reference, the font family package distributed at rsms.me/inter includes both the variable font and italics variants

[laurmaedje]

We indeed used the distribution from Google Fonts which does not have italics. Typst does not support variable fonts currently, but the website you linked also provides static fonts. We can switch to these.

[genericusername3]

I would be very grateful for that, if it's not too much effort! Inter is my personal go-to for digital sans-serifs

[alerque]

Google fonts has a laundry list of limitations they are working around and this often results in hobbled fonts. There are various reasons they are good *for their target niche: web browsers loading dynamic content. That doesn't always make them the best builds for typesetter/publishing use. For any fonts that build and distribute directly from the upstream project and are not just available on GF the project distributions are usually better. There are exceptions for fonts that were only partially developed whet GF decided to adopt them and they forked, improved, and then published the results without also releasing the updated sources separately. You can usually tell by the timing of the font artifacts being added to the GF repo compared to commit and release activity on the upstream project repo. If the latter is active then go with that when using fonts for anything other than online browser based typesetting work.

[genericusername3]

I mean, I, too, would like an extensive up-to-date font catalogue but I suspect building something like that from scratch might be too big a task for now

[laurmaedje]

We intentionally curated our own font list rather than just having all of Google fonts. We just downloaded some of the fonts from there. Good to know that there are often differences to the upstream repositories.

[PgBiel]

Just ran into the same issue; the solution was to download the Inter font directly from https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases/. Seems like there was a new release in November 2023 as well (Inter 4.0), and the README claims Google Fonts is outdated. Perhaps the webapp could just switch to the Inter 4.0 release from GitHub?

Edit: regarding the variable font matter, this seems relevant: google/fonts#2386 (comment)