This repository is the official upstream Google Fonts Axis Registry.
This data-set is synced into the central github.com/google/fonts git repo, through which all Google Fonts assets are onboarded.
The actual Axis Registry lives within the actual live Google Fonts product, surfaced at fonts.google.com/variablefonts#axis-definitions – so axis definitions are only final when they appear on that page, and this repository will from time to time contain fresh data not in the live system, and subject to change.
This repo is structured as a Python package/module, providing easy access to the registry data-set from Python programs.
The Python package contains a collection of metadata source files that collectively form the Google Fonts Axis Registry.
This module is the central place for dataset updates. After updates are made here on the main
branch, the maintainers of the central repo will update subtree located at google/fonts/axisregistry
and then work to push those changes through to the live Google Fonts API via sandbox servers, according to the typical push process. For more detailed information, please see the Axis Registry section of the google/fonts
repository explained article in the GF Guide.
tag
font-variation-settings
and CSS API requests.display_name
tag
.min_value
max_value
default_value
precision
0
means values must be specified as whole numbers while -1
means values can be as precise as one decimal place.fallback
Default
and its value should correspond to the default_value
position of the axis.fallback_only
true
, for continuous range axes should be set to false.
description
We support a superset of the OpenType axis registry axis set, and use additional metadata for each axis. Axes present in a font file but not in this registry will not function via our API. No variable font is expected to support all of the axes here.
Any font foundry or distributor library that offers variable fonts has a implicit, latent, de-facto axis registry, which can be extracted by scanning the library for axes' tags, labels, and min/def/max values. While in 2016 Microsoft originally offered to include more axes in the OpenType 1.8 specification (github.com/microsoft/OpenTypeDesignVariationAxisTags), by August 2020 this effort had stalled. We hope more foundries and distributors will publish documents like this that make their axes explicit, to encourage of adoption of variable fonts throughout the industry, and provide source material for a future update to the OpenType specification's axis registry.