Hello InDesign team, this is still broken nowadays and is causing headaches for designers who can't use variable fonts for Arabic, Thai, or Devanagari in InDesign. See the attached screenshots for issues in Thai and Devanagari rendering.

This issue also happens in Arabic (where using the World-Ready composers is absolutely necessary).

See the attached picture of Markazi Text, which exhibits two problems:

* The advance widths do not variate when using the VF (red line showing how the line lengths match when they shouldn't)
* Mark positioning does not variate either, or is generally wrong (orange and green rectangles)

The advance width problem is particularly bad when using a thin weight that has a lower advance width: it makes the letters disconnect from each other.

The Markazi Text font can be downloaded from: https://github.com/BornaIz/markazitext/tree/master/fonts

As an aside: there are 2 other copies of this discussion, could you please merge them or delete the others? I commented on another one already that has 3 votes, but I'm copying my comment here as this discussion seems to have been noticed by Adobe. Thanks in advance!

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/39701212-variable-fonts-broken-with-world-ready-paragraph-c
https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/39701215-variable-fonts-broken-with-world-ready-paragraph-c

This issue also happens in Arabic (where using the World-Ready composers is absolutely necessary).

See the attached picture of Markazi Text, which exhibits two problems:

* The advance widths do not variate when using the VF (red line showing how the line lengths match when they shouldn't)
* Mark positioning does not variate either, or is generally wrong (orange and green rectangles)

The advance width problem is particularly bad when using a thin weight that has a lower advance width: it makes the letters disconnect from each other.

The Markazi Text font can be downloaded from: https://github.com/BornaIz/markazitext/tree/master/fonts

Using the World-ready composer essentially breaks the glyph width interpolation of Variable Fonts. The outcome is that text set in a Variable Font will receive the Variable Font's default style's horizontal glyph widths for any axis location, resulting in unusable overlap or gaps.

Attached you find a sample Indesign file with comparison and a screenshot thereof. This happens with any Variable Font I have tested so var, but to complete the same test case as included, download https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro/releases/download/3.006R/source-sans-pro-3.006R.zip and install VAR/SourceSansVariable-Roman.otf as well as OTF/*.otf files.

Using the World-ready composer essentially breaks the glyph width interpolation of Variable Fonts. The outcome is that text set in a Variable Font will receive the Variable Font's default style's horizontal glyph widths for any axis location, resulting in unusable overlap or gaps.

Attached you find a sample Indesign file with comparison and a screenshot thereof. This happens with any Variable Font I have tested so var, but to complete the same test case as included, download https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans-pro/releases/download/3.006R/source-sans-pro-3.006R.zip and install VAR/SourceSansVariable-Roman.otf as well as OTF/*.otf files.