Add Karmilla

[hmaesta]

I really like Karla (Google Fonts), but unfortunately that is a dead project.
Karmilla is a replacement, with support for several languages.

Karmilla is a slightly modified version of Karla.

Karla is an outstanding grotesque sans serif typeface family created by Jonathan Pinhorn (@jonpinhorn_type, a graduate of the MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading), released through Google Webfonts in 2012.

The aim of Karmilla is to offer a workaround for designers who want to use Karla but need support for French, German, Norvegian, Slovak or Icelandic, which requires adding and tweaking some glyphs.

→ https://github.com/ms-studio/karmilla

[hmaesta]

Realized that is already a discussion about this on ms-studio/karmilla#31.

[davelab6]

Also mentioned today https://twitter.com/eddiehultin/status/1070331897820127232

[andrewshadura]

Any updates please?

[hmaesta]

I think this font project is abandoned.

ms-studio/karmilla#54

[andrewshadura]

No, it certainly isn’t.

[RosaWagner]

Hi @hmaesta, we actually updated Karla's glyphset at the beginning of the year. There are some clear design issues though (capital eszett for example), but we would rather continue improving Karla instead of onboarding a new family. If you are willing to improve Karla, you can tag me in a pull request in https://github.com/googlefonts/karla and I'll be happy to review ;)

[andrewshadura]

Well, I asked in googlefonts/karla#8, and received no response for two years…
googlefonts/karla#4 has also not been answered since May 2021.

[RosaWagner]

yeah well we don't "watch" all the googlefonts repositories (they are hundreds of them and we are 5 people) but if you tag me or another onboarder we can give it a look. I mean for pull requests. In this repository you can also see that we have several thousands of open issues and a queue of hundreds of projects to onboard or debug. It's not that they are dead, it just take time, and I am giving time now.

[andrewshadura]

Great, thanks.
I guess the last missing bits are the Cyrillic letters, possibly something else. Once you pull those in, as @ms-studio pointed out, the raison d'être for the fork will cease to exist.

[emmamarichal]

Hello everyone! I just opened the sources again in fontforge, and I saw that italics are missing for cyrillic (at least in bold).

So in the current state (missing glyphs, old fontforge file, no italics), it's complicated for us to merge Cyrillic with Karla.
Too many elements are still missing. If you want to update this, it would be easier to work directly on the Karla, and on the Glyphs or ufo files.
Thanks anyway for this sollicitation :)

[andrewshadura]

@emmamarichal, thanks for the update.
Unfortunately, I cannot run Glyphs since it’s Mac-only, and also I’m afraid I personally lack skills and time to improve the Cyrillic glyphs.

[davelab6]

@andrewshadura sure, I understand. Commissioning a cyrillic roman quality upgrade and new italic is a good idea for the future, so I'm adding this to the "icebox" milestone, but for now I don't think this is practical to move ahead.