Font families VSTGUI

Hello
I am using Open Sans Semibold font which I have installed and detected by MS Paint, but VSTGUI/UIEditor seems to find only the families (only Open Sans). Semibold it is as if not detected. How to set font variant?
(I am using SDK 2018 for this project)!
obraz|165x102

2 Likes

I am having the same issue. VSTGUI only knows about the Font family and their Bold/Italic styles, but variants are inaccessible. Anything like Book, Light, ExtraLight, Medium, SemiBold and your out of luck.
I think you should file an issue in the Github repository about this.

Yeah, this is a limitation that I don’t think will be changed as I think that this will break backwards compatibility.

You are making typographers very sad. :cry:

A workaround would be to edit the font family properties so that all variants will show up as a proper font, not one family.
EDIT: I also miss other typographic features like being able to set letter spacing.
proper wide . S P A C I N G . is super important for all caps.

Wouldn’t adding a subfamily be a workaround that don’t break backward compatibility?

I would solve it as thus:

Assume that the fonts copyright issues are satisfied and the fonts files are available so they can be embedded in the vst file as resources.

The first thing is to check if their ‘internal names’ differ. You do this in Windows by double-clicking the font file so that the font-viewer utility opens up the font for you to see it.

This utility will also display some attributes one of which is ‘Font name’, this is the ‘internal name’ which is also the font name the ui-description parser understands.

Now some fonts’ variants internal names are distinct while others are all similar.
For example I have a font family whose filenames are all distinct, such as…
Alien-Encounters-Bold.ttf
Alien-Encounters-Bold-Italic.ttf
Alien-Encounters-Italic.ttf
but all of them have the same internal name ‘Alien-Encounters’.

If this is the case with your font family files then you will need to have a font-editing utility that should help you rename the internal names such that they become distinct, hence the copyright issue.

Note that some other font family files internal names are already
distinct so the above step can be skipped.

Once done you can peruse here Custom Font with VSTGUI4
to see how to embed fonts as resources in a vst and how to declare them in the ui-description file, with the exception that now you will treat every typeface, i.e. bolt, italic and so on as a distinct font.