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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!

Zach Leatherman :11ty:

@r0b great multi-language support on that one! (read: subsetting needed 😅)

@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)