Today I learnt about Mesonbuild and was impressed by this demo of it building gtk+ form git as well as all its main dependencies (also from git). This make life much much easier for setting up a bleeding-edge gtk+ development environment where all this new variable font stuff is available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dB80CjH_3Q

Build progressed quite nicely up until (ironically), pango/fonts.c with an undeclared symbol related to EMOJI :-D

2018-03-06 18:15 GMT-03:00 Felipe Sanches <juca@...2270...>:

2018-03-06 17:49 GMT-03:00 Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@...3544...>:

FreeType/FontConfig/Cairo/Pango stack has more or less full variable
fonts support now, Inkscape needs to be updated to make use of the
support already available in all these libraries.

https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2018/01/03/more-fun-with-fonts/

Wow! This is super cool!

I specially loved the CSS animation of the weight of the text when the cursor hovers over a button. 

This seems to replace Tav's opentype features selector via a GTK font-selector dialog. It also seems that we could have the innitial variable fonts support in inkscape basically hooking up to this newly improved GTK dialog. Naturally, that would require Inkscape to rely on a pretty recent version of GTK.