Source Serif 4 SmText seems too thin (?)

David Perry
David Perry Posts: 25
edited May 2025 in Font Technology
I'm looking at Source Serif 4 and its optical sizes.  I believe SmText is for "small text," which I would expect to be intermediate between Caption and Regular.  But it looks like it actually fits between Regular and Subhead; see the screen shot attached.  Yes, SmText and Regular are close, but still -- a "small text" with thinner stems and closer spacing than Regular? I found a blog post from Adobe about the new optical sizes in SS4 that says Caption and Small Text are designed for reading "minuscule text." Am I missing something?

Comments

  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,152
    Your summary of expectations is exactly correct: in Adobe’s usage, Small Text is supposed to be an intermediate optical size between Caption and Regular. (Long history here, but in short: I am very sure of this.)

    The screen shot seems to show something quite wrong. Not sure what happened there.

    Of course, if you just use the variable font version of it, you should be fine.
  • David Perry
    David Perry Posts: 25
    edited June 2025
    Thank you, Thomas.  It's nice to know I understood things correctly and didn't overlook something obvious.

    FYI, I tested the semibold versions of all the optical sizes and they give the same result as the regular (SmText too thin).  I don't know if this might make a difference, but I downloaded the fonts from Google not directly from Adobe.

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