There is no longer a requirement that all the masters have exactly the same base color glyphs as the default masters. Similarly, it's no longer required that all masters' LayerLists have the same total count of layers. It is sufficient that, for a base color glyph in the default master, a non-default master may (or may not) contain one with the same name and same effective number of layers (which in turn can be laid out differently in the respective LayerLists).
This provides greater flexibility when working with variable font project with sparse glyph sets.
previously we only reused the VarIndexBase of a previously seen variable table when the current's varIdxes were _fully_ equal to one of the previous; now we also try to find a match anywhere in the accummulated list of self.varIdxes, including a partial match at the tail of the list.
When multiple variable tables refer to the same delta-sets they can now share the same VarIndexBase so the resulting DeltaSetIndexMap is a bit smaller.
For simplicity, we only reuse VarIndexBase when variable tables fully share (ie. same, and same number of) varIdxes; potentially we could reuse subsets of varIdxes (e.g. a VarColoStop.Alpha has a +0.5 delta, and later on elsewhere a PaintVarSolid.Alpha has a similar +0.5 delta; the latter could have a VarIndexBase that reuses an existing DeltaSetIndexMap entry for the former), but for now this I think is good enough.
Before we were too greedy in the way we converted subtables to VarType. E.g. If a PaintTransform wrapping a PaintRadialGradient contained variations in the Affine2x3, we would incorrectly convert also the gradient's ColorLine (and ColorStops) to VarColorLine, VarColorStop, etc. (even if the gradient was not variable!). Instead we want skip traversing a given subtable including its children when the predicate doesn't match.
The exception UnsupportedFormat was defined and then redefined with the same name in varLib.errors, and imported twice from varLib.merger, probably as result of a sweeping find/replace.
Rename it 'InconsistentFormats' as originally intended.
See pull request: https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools/pull/2326
The new module `otlLib.optimize.gpos` provides `compact` functions that
can reduce the file size of GPOS PairPos lookups by splitting subtables
in a smart way to avoid storing zero-valued pairs.
The compaction methods are called from `otlLib.builder` and
`varLib.merger` so that static and variable fonts can benefit from the
optimization at compile time.
The new module `otlLib.optimize` is also executable, to allow running
the optimization on existing fonts.
The optimization is a trade-off because on the one hand it can reduce
significantly the byte size of the GPOS table (up to 50% in random
Google Fonts) but on the other hand it adds to the compilation time and
may make fonts very slightly bigger once compressed to WOFF2 (because
WOFF2 doesn't mind about zero values and compresses them very well).
As such, the optimization is off by default, and you can activate it by
providing the environment variable `FONTTOOLS_GPOS_COMPACT_MODE=5` for
example (values from 0 = off to 9 = max file size savings, but many more
subtables).
