User Guide

Multiple Master Fonts
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The axis type is necessary to identify a new axis. As we said in previous
sections, there are four registered axis types:
Weight
Variation of the font’s weight
Width
Variation of the font’s width
Optical Size
Variation of the font’s design to make it more legible at different font
sizes.
Serif
Modification of the font’s style. Usually this is used for modification
of the font’s serifs. For example, from serif to sans-serif font, or
variation of the serifs’ width.
Usually it is not necessary to fill in all three edit fields. Just select or enter
the axis name and FontLab will automatically fill in all the other fields.
Check the Convert hints to links before adding new axis option to
automatically apply the Convert Hints to Links action to all characters of
the font. We recommend converting hints to links because in a MM font it
is much easier to edit links than hints. Links are Multiple Master-
compatible by default, because they connect multilayered nodes, while
hints connect points that have different coordinates on different masters.
When you define an axis the number of masters will be increased twofold.
Therefore a single-axis font will have two masters, a two-axis font will have
four masters, etc. The contents of all existing masters will be duplicated, as
seen in the picture:
Weight 0
Weight 0
Width 0
Weight 0
Width 1
Weight 1
Width 0
Weight 1
Width 1
Weight 1