Two masters nearly identical in designspace
Audit code: master-too-close
Definition
Two masters sit within 5% of each other in designspace. Either one master is redundant, or you have a deliberately tight intermediate-master pair worth confirming. Tight master pairs increase the gvar table size and rarely change rendered output between them.
How Patens surfaces this
The Patens audit module checks for master-too-close across five teaching surfaces: the edit-panel inline issue list, the
project-wide audit page, the release pre-flight check, the family hub,
and the home-page project tile. Every surface shows the same plain-English
explanation and links back to this page. This rule is detection-only — there's no automatic fix because the
correction is design-dependent (it requires a judgment call about the
glyph's intended shape or the font's intended behaviour). The audit
message links to the specific glyph or field that needs attention.
Run this check yourself
Patens runs every audit rule live as you draw — including this one.
The editor (in private alpha) shows master-too-close firing on real
glyphs, or check your own work from the CLI:
npx patens audit your-project.font.jsonCanonical references
Primary literature where this rule is established or explained. Drawn from the open-licensed corpus — browse the full 38-source canonical library or read the research artifact.
- Unified Font Object 3 Specification ↗
Tal Leming, Just van Rossum, Erik van Blokland · 2003 · unifiedfontobject.org· Designspace — master placement
Designspace v5 supports arbitrary master locations; the responsibility for non-redundant master placement is on the designer.
- A Variable Fonts Primer ↗
variablefonts.io contributors · 2018 · variablefonts.io· Implementing variable fonts
Master count and placement affect both file size (gvar deltas) and runtime interpolation cost.