in Adobe CC, Affinity, CorelDraw… & most apps with “live” interactive interfaces
Many major graphics/publishing apps have missed the boat with their user interface choices for variable fonts. Given the ongoing steady growth of variable font usage and availability, it seems worth fixing things. The biggest problem, and the easiest one to fix, is lacking ongoing access to axis settings while working with text. Other issues include maintaining common settings across fonts, and accessing the pre-set meaningful axis values while using sliders.
How common are variable fonts, anyway? Variable fonts make up 28% of all fonts available on Google Fonts, but only 7% of Adobe Fonts (as of mid-2026). The percentage is smaller on MyFonts, but with over 3000 variable font families there is still a dignificant number for those who like the technology.
Note: I will gladly give app-specific advice and feedback to any developer who would like to discuss/improve their application’s behaviors in this area.
The Variable Font Settings panel
Ongoing Settings Access
Variation selection needs to be just as easy to access as selecting a font style, because it is essentially the same thing. But putting the detailed variation settings exclusively on a transient pop-up/fly-out menu, which goes away as soon as you click anywhere else, including on other text is a bad idea. This creates an extra click… Every. Single. Time. …one wants to do this thing that needs to be done all the time.
The temporary fly-out in Adobe InDesign; many other apps are similar.
Without using character or paragraph styles, you want to replicate settings from one place somewhere else, or base settings on other settings? Too bad.
A variable font instance is ~ equivalent to a font style. Apps generally let people click in any text to see exactly what font style is currently selected for that text… except when the selected text is in an instance of a variable font, that is set to something other than one of its predefined instances.
Variable font axes offer continuous ranges to choose from, and often two, three or more of them. Because of this, one often looks at what one has already done, axis-settings–wise, to figure out what to do next.
Users need to be able to play with and explore variations. When we click in some text or on a text box, we often want to instantly see what the variation settings are for that text. All of these things require an option or route to have the variation settings not be solely a pop-up that is only active when you move your pointer over and click on it in the character settings.
It mostly isn’t that the elements within the typical pop-up settings interface are terribly wrong (modulo some refinments, see below), but the biggest thing is just their transience. Perhaps it could be a part of the same panel that has font selection/formatting controls, that is available whenever a variable font is selected.
Making Stop Points Visible
The other oddball thing is, most apps just pop up sliders, with no indication as to what the values mean. Sure, you have a weight axis, but no indicator as when you are using a slider as to what particular weight is Semibold (for example). Fonts have two ways of indicating such standard values on axes.
The one people are most used to is a list of static styles, equivalent to a style name or menu name for a single-master font. Each such style is a specific combination of values.
The more useful one on a per-axis basis is to get named stop points for that axis, from the font. More recent variable fonts may have a STAT table, which can have Axis Value Tables from the font that provide such information. These points could be highlighted on the sliders of the variable font settings pane, perhaps with some slight “snap” to make them more easily selected (e.g. if the slider is being moved via drag, and that value is within 1% of the slider range, jump to it).
For example, in a typical font with a weight axis, the 100-unit increments tend to correspond to named weights (e.g. Thin = 100, ExtraLight = 200, Light = 300, Regular = 400, etc.), and it would be nice if there was some way to show this on the weight axis slider.
On the plus side, when you get all your slider settings lined up with a named instance, InDesign and Affinity Publisher do show you the current instance name. That is nice.
Apps & Axis Settings
Switching Fonts
When one switches from one font to another, versions of InDesign, Illustrator, Affinity Publisher and CorelDraw that I tested aren’t smart enough to preserve axis values, even if the other font has the same axes and supports the same values. This may seem like a corner case, but consider that in many variable font families, the upright and italics are separate fonts. (Yes, they are also sometimes in the same family, if it has an “italic” or “slant” axis. But both scenarios are common.)
Mind you, many apps won’t even let you use their standard keyboard shortcut to swap from regular to italic (or the reverse) when a variable font is in play. Adobe Illustrator does—but all the other variable font settings reset to their default values when you do this. This rather spoils the point of the operation: switching between upright and italic while keeping the other variable font settings the same.
When you are switching between fonts that have at least some of the same axes available, and the same settings available in the second font, the app should maintain those settings. I tried this with many fonts in multiple apps and had no joy from any of them.
Sure, don’t worry about axes they don’t have in common, but for ones they do… preserve the settings when switching fonts if you can. At least, preserve any axis setting that is at a non-default value. (OK, that shows that there are potential subtleties and questions here. But that is no excuse to just leave the situation at Maximum Awfulness.)
Axis Granularity vs Standard Values
Over in Affinity Publisher, the axis sliders are given a surprisingly coarse granularity. Each slider has a maximum of 21 stops, so they “jump” pretty coarsely. This has interesting side effects in terms of one being unable to stop sliders particularly close to desired or standard values. If a font has a weight axis that goes from 100–900, the weight slider is going in 40-unit increments, one can’t quite get within “can’t tell the difference” range of Regular (400) with the slider, as it stops at either 380 or 420. Instead you have to manually enter the number. Not the end of the world, but feels a bit weird.
Adobe does only somewhat better in this regard, with jumps fine enough that they seem almost continuous. But one still can’t land right on the named values, even though 401 or 398 is close to 400.
Other Issues
Optical Size
Every app should offer an option to automatically pick the correct optical size setting, when using fonts that have an optical size axis. This should be on by default, both with text in new documents, and in the style settings when creating a new paragraph style (and perhaps character style?).
Copy/paste
I know it is too much to hope that copy/paste between apps will always maintain variable font custom axis settings. But maybe at least between apps from the same vendor? And certainly within the same app.
InDesign width axis and hyphenation
When one has a narrow text block in InDesign, in a language that it knows, with hyphenation on, and adjusts the Width axis on the first couple of words, it can do some truly bizarre things with breaking words via hyphenation, when the whole thing could easily fit. I hit this when trying to put a small variable font showing in the family winter holiday card… it was sufficiently frustrating that I ended up starting this blog post last year, instead of continuing to work on the family holiday card.