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[2] was raised in 2012 and still in discussion. I have no idea how fonts are made. Why does it take 2+ years to make a font italic?

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Because you need to come up with a design for the cursive variant and then draw all those glyphs.

So the time needed is probably shorter than the time spent on the regular variant, but only by a small factor, certainly not orders of magnitude.

You are right. From reading the comments on the issue [2], this seems to be the reason why it takes so long. Although I have now idea of how fonts are made, I think the work needs to be done for all currently available weights (7 different weights).

The glyphs can look completely different in italic. http://www.fffranziska.com/#sec_italics And after drawing the glyphs, manually checking and adjusting the kerning between every pair of glyphs takes a lot of time too.

Its not just in discussion, a person has been commissioned and working on it for quite a while. it was 2 days he push the latest version.

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