In a recent type design conference, one of the major pain points that users encountered in variable fonts was how difficult it was to change the defined named instances in a variable font.

Type designers usually define values for the wght axis. Sometimes, they add named instances for other axes, sometimes they don’t. If they do, the font might end up with dozens of named instances. While including all of those named instances for all axes allows users to easily pick them in applications, it also clutters the UI significantly.

Designers usually use a limited subset of a variable font for specific use cases. Think heading, subheading, paragraph text, and captions. These may mix and match from multiple axes like wght and opsz and may even use custom values, like a wght value of 625. While designers can play with sliders to define these instances in applications, it can be time-consuming to set it every time and very few people outside of the design department know how to do that. Instead, it’s far easier if they could easily define named instances. That way, non-techie people can easily pick the fonts that match the brand.

Lastly, many applications have technical limitations that require you to pick only from named instances. In these apps, you are limited to the instances that type designers defined and have no way to easily customize your own.

For apps that don’t support variable fonts at all, there is:

• https://mutsuntsai.github.io/fontfreeze/
• https://twardoch.github.io/fonttools-opentype-feature-freezer/

However, I still see benefits of writing a web gui to define named instances for both ease of use and limited application support. Currently, there aren’t any tools to CRUD (create, read, update, delete) NamedInstances for variable fonts. I would like to make one.

I’ve seen utilities for:

• adding names to the name table https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/43712/#Comment_43712
• accessing existing instances https://github.com/MuTsunTsai/fontfreeze/blob/main/src/python/main.py#L338

But, is there a utility or example for CRUD for NamedInstances? I would like to avoid parsing and writing xml, if possible.