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@zachleat @stoyan

I was wondering about this the other month, there was a variable version of a font we were using that was like 1.3Mb, surely that defeats the point!

@r0b @stoyan surely the desktop variant!

@zachleat i had to look it up, it was Playfair Display and it had two variable woff2 format (for web?) files. Each 500KB!

The TTF were 1.4MB each

https://github.com/clauseggers/Playfair/releases/tag/2.101

@zachleat @r0b 1.4Mb TTF (source) becomes 278K after subset to latin only and turned to WOFF:
glyphhanger --subset="PlayfairRomanVF.ttf" --LATIN --formats=woff2
Though the subset didn't remove too many characters. Its LATIN supports 713 characters (down from 1603) which is very exhaustive. 3 times what the average Google font supports when subset to LATIN

I wonder if it's the "Optical size" axis that makes fonts bigger (as another comment suggested)