Select default style of variable font family

[grantmcdermott]

Description

Hi folks,

Hopefully this isn't a duplicate, but is there a way to select the default style (e.g. "light" instead of "regular") for variable font families? I'm specifically interested in a solution for the Typst engine, but hopefully the answer would apply more generally. Perhaps a font-style flag to go along with font-path and co.?

P.S. My rather hackish workaround at the moment is to download the font family of interest (i.e.,including all styles), but then only copy across the subset of selected styles to my system font book.

[mcanouil]

Did you look at Typst documentation? https://typst.app/docs/

Then you'll likely need to tweak the partials: https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/typst-custom.html#advanced-customization

For other formats, the approach is the same and require to know the language used as there is no direct YAML option for this in Pandoc and Quarto.

[grantmcdermott]

Thanks @mcanouil. Looks like this lacks upstream support in Typst at the moment, regardless of custom partials. typst/typst#185

I'll stick with my workaround for the moment and hopefully revisit once Typst gets better native support for variable fonts.

[grantmcdermott]

UPDATE: For most variable fonts, I've found that setting the weight "manually" as part of include-before-body in the YAML works pretty well.

For example, here using the Amazon Ember fonts (zip link):

format:
  typst:
    mainfont: "Amazon Ember Cd RC"
    include-before-body:
      - text: |
          #set text(font: "Amazon Ember Cd RC", weight: "light")

... unfortunately, this doesn't pertain to any pre-body elements like the abstract. So these elements will still be in the regular font, rather than the variable option that you specified as part of your yaml (here: "light" weight).

[mcanouil]

Did you try adding this in the header?
Or setting this in a partial?

[gordonwoodhull]

Currently as of Quarto 1.5 and Pandoc 3.2, the Pandoc Typst template puts "headers" at the top of the body, after the show rule that displays the title and abstract. So our Quarto Typst template does this too.

I have opened an issue and hope to get this changed in Pandoc, after which we can make the change in Quarto 1.6:
jgm/pandoc#9996

For now you could add your #set text(...) line to the top of the typst-show.typ partial to get the same effect.
https://quarto.org/docs/journals/templates.html#typst-partials

Or copy template.typ from here:
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/blob/cd3c8e69b8b3fd97d1960e9c704ea63e9a751da5/src/resources/formats/typst/pandoc/quarto/template.typ

and use include-in-header and template like so:

format:
  typst:
    template: template.typ
    mainfont: "Amazon Ember Cd RC"
    include-in-header:
      - text: |
          #set text(font: "Amazon Ember Cd RC", weight: "light")

[grantmcdermott]

Fantastic, thanks both!

As an aside, I have been wondering whether it makes sense for Quarto to support a fontweight argument, similar to fontsize. Thoughts?

[gordonwoodhull]

It’s a bit more complicated, since there are a few different kinds of elements (heading, paragraph, code) you might want to customize, and also a few other interesting font properties. And font weight may or may not use the same values and keywords in all formats, I’m not sure.

Traditionally we’ve ducked and said you can just escape to the underlying format (e.g. CSS or Typst) if you don’t like the defaults. See e.g. #5425 font-weight for h1 and h2

This often makes the most sense, because we don’t need to duplicate the entire universe in our API.

But allowing consistent branding across formats is something we are looking at in 1.6, and that includes typography settings.

So I won’t speculate on the interface and I won’t promise, but I think it’s likely we will have a general way to customize this.

[grantmcdermott]

Ah, that all makes sense. Thanks again for the help.