Our Tools section has received a very special update. We are proud to announce the first third-party tool in our web store: DTL OTMaster 7.9.

Inspect, test and edit your compiled OTFs and TTFs with Dutch Type Library’s OTMaster, known by it users as ‘OTM’. It has been a corner stone in the font production process of many foundries all around the world. OTM’s unparalleled tools make it the Swiss army knife for font production. Read more about OTMaster.

DTL OTMaster 7.9 – now available through glyphsapp.com.

Join Glyphs member Rainer Scheichelbauer in a 1-day Syndicom workshop and create your first variable font! Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Workshop: Make Your First Variable Font [de]

• When?

  Montag, 10. Juni 2019
  9:00–16.45 Uhr

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  Bahnhof Buffet Olten
  Olten, Schweiz

• How much?

  Kategorie 1: CHF: 0.–
  Kategorie 2: CHF 140.–
  Kategorie 3: CHF 640.–
  (Kategorie 1: syndicom- und Syna-Mitglieder aus VISCOM vertragstreuen Betrieben. Kategorie 2: Alle anderen syndicom Mitglieder. Kategorie 3: Nichtmitglieder.)

• For whom?

  Schriftgestalter, Grafiker, UX- und Webdesigner, die sich für Schrift interessieren. Verfügbare Plätze: 20.

• Prerequisites

  Eigenes MacBook mit Glyphs und einem aktuellen Web-Browser. Erfahrung mit Vektografik nützlich, aber nicht nötig.

• Links

  Info bei Syndicom

Variable Fonts sind die Zukunft der Schrifttechnologie. Lerne, wie du mit dem intuitiven Font-Editor „Glyphs“ einen neuen Font anlegst und ihn mit einfachen Mitteln sogar animierst. Am Ende des Tages nimmst du einen Font mit einem variablen Emoji und einen Font mit einigen bewegten Buchstaben mit nachhause. Im Zuge des Workshops testest du deinen variablen Font in Web-Browsern und (je nach Verfügbarkeit) in den neuesten Adobe-Apps.

Join Glyphs member Rainer Scheichelbauer in a 1-day Syndicom workshop and create your first variable font! Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Workshop: Make Your First Variable Font [fr]

• When?

  Mardi 11 juin 2019
  9:00–16:45 h

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  NH Hotel Fribourg
  Fribourg, Suisse

• How much?

  Catégorie 1: CHF 0.–
  Catégorie 2: CHF 140.–
  Catégorie 3: CHF 640.–
  (Catégorie 1: membres syndicom et Syna des entreprises affiliées à Viscom. Catégorie 2: Tous les autres membres syndicom. Catégorie 3: Non-membres.)

• For whom?

  Concepteurs de polices, concepteurs graphiques, UX et concepteurs Web qui s'intéressent aux polices de caractères. Places disponibles: 20.

• Prerequisites

  MacBook avec Glyphs 2 installé.

• Links

  Informations chez Syndicom

Les polices variables sont l'avenir de la technologie typographique. Apprenez à utiliser le logiciel intuitif «Glyphs» pour créer votre propre police et même l'animer avec des moyens simples qui vous introduiront à la technologie variable. À la fin de la journée, vous aurez deux polices, une première avec un emoji variable et une autre avec des lettres animées. Au cours de l'atelier, vous testerez votre police variable dans les navigateurs web et dans les dernières applications Adobe.

Creating a new Korean font, with such a large character set, can seem like a daunting task—where to begin?! This tutorial will give you all the tools you need to get started with Korean and show you the basics of creating a new Korean font in Glyphs. If you’re already familiar with the Korean language feel free to jump ahead.

The Jamo Alphabet

The Korean script is called Hangeul (or Hangul) and is comprised of syllables made up of component letters called Jamo. There are three categories of Jamo: Choseong (consonants at the start of a syllable), Jungseong (vowels in the middle of a syllable), and Jongseong (consonants at the end of a syllable).

Here are all the possible Jamo in modern Korean:

• Choseong (initial): ᄀᄁᄂᄃᄄᄅᄆᄇᄈᄉᄊᄋᄌᄍᄎᄏᄐᄑᄒ
• Jungseong (medial): ㅏㅑㅓㅕㅗㅛㅜㅠㅡㅣㅐㅒㅔㅖㅘㅙㅚㅝㅞㅟㅢ
• Jongseong (final): ㄱㄲㄳㄴㄵㄶㄷㄹㄺㄻㄼㄽㄾㄿㅀㅁㅂㅄㅅㅆㅇㅈㅊㅋㅌㅍㅎ

For more information on these Jamo, how to pronounce them, and other information on Hangeul, please check out the wikipedia article.

Syllable Construction

Hangeul syllables are constructed from Jamo in one of six ways depending on the vowel (Jungseong) used in the syllable:

White is the initial Choseong, yellow is the medial Jungseong, and dark gray is the final Jongseong.

These six different syllables are named based on their structure.

1. Horizontal combination (initial consonant with vertical vowel).
2. Vertical combination (initial consonant with horizontal vowel).
3. Mixed combination (initial consonant with mixed vowel).
4. Horizontal combination with a final consonant.
5. Vertical combination with a final consonant.
6. Mixed combination with a final consonant.

Let’s look at some example syllables:

You’ll note that the relative positions of the Choseong and Jungseong stay the same, regardless of the addition of a Jongseong.

Hint: We recommend that you design at least one of each of these six syllable variants by hand early in your workflow. Doing so will help you determine guides, alignments, and sizes of letters quickly.

Now that you’ve got a basic handle on Korean, let’s get started!

Korean & Unicode

Glyphs makes it simple to add all the Hangeul unicode characters you need for your project. In the sidebar, under the Languages > Korean section, there are different subcategories:

• Jamo Compatibility: This is the unicode block used to represent the Jamo in an isolated form.
• Choseong: These are the consonant Jamo in the initial position.
• Jungseong: These are the vowel Jamo in the medial position.
• Jongseong: These are the consonant Jamo in the final position.

Pro Tip: A key feature in Glyphs is the inclusion of technology that automatically generates the Hangeul syllables. This technology requires the use of the Choseong / Jungseong / Jongseong unicode blocks. If you are planning to build the syllables individually by hand, use of these unicode slots is not necessary.

Hangeul syllables are each represented with their own unicode slots. There are two subcategories that you should consider.

• Basic Syllables: These are the core 2,780 Hangeul syllables based on the KS X 1001 standard and Adobe-KR standards. This is all you need for modern Korean typesetting, and probably what you want to have in your font as well. Trust me.
• All Syllables: These are the full set of syllables (11,172) for anything that could possibly ever occur.

Some other subcategories worth noting:

• Codepages > Adobe-KR: These entries cover the various Adobe-KR standards used for creating Korean fonts. Many major type foundries use these for their fonts.
• Codepages > KS X 1001 (Hanja): This category covers Chinese characters used for Korean text. These characters are not common in modern Korean use.

To add these subcategories to your font, right click on each to list all missing glyphs, press Cmd-A to select them all, and click Generate.

Basic syllable creation

Now let’s get down to drawing! For this example, let’s focus on the glyph 밈 mim-ko, a mixed combination syllable with a final consonant. To create this syllable, we’ll need four glyphs—three Jamo and the full syllable:

mieumCho-ko
iJung-ko
mieumJong-ko
mim-ko

If you don’t already have these glyphs in your font, you can either add them through the left sidebar Languages > Korean, or select Glyph > Add Glyphs… (Cmd-Shift-G) from the top menu and paste the names above in the box. Once you confirm the dialog, and ta-daa, all of the necessary glyphs are added to your font.

Hint: In Glyphs, all Korean glyphs are marked with the suffix -ko. Additionally, to differentiate between which Jamo is at the start, middle, and end of a syllable, the abbreviations Cho for Choseong, Jung for Jungseong, and Jong for Jongseong are used in the glyph name. For example, yiJung-ko denoting the vowel yi, or mieumCho-ko denoting the initial version of the consonant mieum.

Please open the mieumCho-ko glyph:

If you’ve used another program for Korean font development, or have created a Latin font in Glyphs, you may notice that the metric box looks different for Korean characters. Instead of the standard baseline, x-height, cap-height, and ascender values, CJK glyphs are displayed using the em-square with the midway points of the em-square marked as well as the font baseline. This enables you to consider positional alignment with other scripts without being distracted by unnecessary metrics.

Pro tip: Glyphs includes an extremely handy feature called CJK Grid which allows you to add a custom grid. Go to File > Font Info > Masters and in the Custom Parameters field, click on the plus and add CJK Grid as Property. Then set the Value as the number of columns and rows you want. We recommend using 8 for Hangeul development.

Let’s draw the mieumCho-ko glyph something like this:

Note in this example the positioning of the Jamo. Given that this syllable has a final consonant, let's place the first consonant high and to the left as this will ensure that the different Jamo do not overlap one another during automatic placement.

Next, double-click the iJung-ko glyph and draw the basic ㅣshape:

Again, note the placement of this Jamo—off to the right of the previous one.

Finally, double-click the mieumJong-ko glyph. As this is the same Jamo as in mieumCho-ko, feel free to copy and paste the outlines you drew here. Then shift it downward to a position underneath the iJung-ko Jamo you drew:

Now go to mim-ko, and you will see an empty glyph:

Here’s where the magic happens. Glyphs knows that the mim-ko is made up of a mieumCho-ko, iJung-ko, and mieumJong-ko, so it can automatically build the syllable for you. Choose Glyph > Make Component Glyph (Cmd-Opt-Shift-C), and boom:

Pro tip: If you are wondering which Jamo are used for a certain syllable, you can preview the compositions in Window > Glyph Info, and overwrite the defaults with your own compositions by writing your own Glyph Data XML.

If you repeat this process for every Jamo in the Choseong, Jungseong, and Jongseong lists, Glyphs can even build out all 11,000+ Hangeul syllables in the All Syllables set. Wow! You’ve just created your first Hangeul font!

This style of Hangeul font is usually referred to as “out-of-frame style” (a.k.a. “deframe” or “de-squared”) and is a fairly contemporary approach to Hangeul design most often used for display typography.

Jamo variants

In the Basic Syllables section, the same Choseong, Jungseong, and Jongseong Jamo is used for every syllable, regardless of structure. However, what if your design requires that you vary the shape of a Jamo depending on the other Jamo in the same syllable?

In the example below, the ㅁ (mieum, marked in blue) changes shape depending on which final Jamo is used:

Looking at these two sample syllables, you’ll note that the ㄴ (nieun) in the first syllable affords the ㅁ (mieum) more vertical space than the ㄹ (rieul) in the second syllable. As you can imagine, every syllable is different, so suddenly you might find yourself with 5, 10, even 20 versions of each Jamo! It might seem scary, but this variation is absolutely important to achieve proper balance and proportion for text typography.

This style of Hangeul is usually referred to as “in-frame style” (or simply “frame” or “squared”) and is the most common style of Hangeul.

Advanced syllable creation

Let’s try out using Jamo variants. For this example, we’ll focus on the man-ko 만. Please add the following glyphs in your font:

man-ko
mieumCho-ko
aJung-ko
nieunJong-ko

Also create two variants:

mieumCho-ko.man
aJung-ko.man

This time, when we draw the mieumCho-ko and aJung-ko, we will draw them at full height, as if we are designing the character 마 ma-ko. First, here comes mieum-ko:

Do the same with aJung-ko:

For the nieunJong-ko, draw it at the bottom of the box, like so:

Now, when we go to man-ko, and press Glyph > Make Component Glyph, we get a rather unpleasant result:

Oh no! Everything is overlapping! But we have a solution. Remember those two variant glyphs we created? Copy the outline from mieumCho-ko into mieumCho-ko.man (or duplicate the glyph with Glyph > Duplicate Glyph and rename the new glyph accordingly), and raise the bottom of the Jamo so there’s room between the top of the ㄴ (nieun) and the bottom of the ㅁ (mieum).

Pro tip: With Smart Components, you can re-use and adapt shapes much easier. Making Smart Components takes a little time, but it is worth it. Otherwise, you would spend lots of time repeating shapes in all kinds of variations.

Once done, go back to man-ko, and select the mieumCho-ko component and click the name mieumCho-ko in the grey info box below ...

... and the window for selecting components will pop up. Search for mieumCho-ko.man and select it:

This will replace the selected component with its .man variant. Ta-daa! With the .man variant, we’ve solved the overlap problem, and achieved better balance between the Choseong and the Jongseong!

Now, you can probably guess already what remains to be done, and select the aJung-ko component:

If you follow the same steps for the aJung-ko, the final result will look like this:

Nice. You deserve a good shoulder pat now. In this example, we were lucky and didn’t need to make any changes to the nieunJong-ko, but in other syllables it will be necessary to swap in an alternate version for this Jamo as well.

Tip: To edit the original glyph of a component, simply double click the (grey) component, and Glyphs will insert the original glyph in Edit view, and even activate it for immediate editing. This way, you can adapt the .man glyphs, and see the combined result right away in the man-ko syllable.

Congratulations! You made your first “in-frame style” Hangeul syllable! Now, just repeat the process for all 2,780 basic Hangeul syllables, and you’ll be done. Easy, right?

Coming soon: Hangeul composition

Lucky for us, Glyphs includes advanced features for the creation of Hangeul syllables. The Hangeul Composition engine allows you to collect glyph variants in groups, establish rules to determine which Jamo should be used where. Once done, the engine will automatically manage the entire database of syllables for you! But that is for our next Korean tutorial.

Have fun and stay tuned!

Guest tutorial by Minjoo Ham and Aaron Bell.
Thanks to Eunyou Noh, Daekwon Kim and Yanghee Rue for their feedback.


SAMPLE FONTS: GEOJANG AND HAHMLET BY MINJOO HAM.

So you have written that great plug-in, and it works as expected, and your users are happy. But then the first complaints are in: ‘Que? No español?’ or ‘Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire? Pas de Français?’ or even ‘Jahimmelherrgottkruzifix, gibt’s denn koa Boarisch?’

In short, your plug-in only speaks English, but your users are running the plug-ins in other languages. If you do not speak their language, usually they will be very cooperative when you ask them how they would translate the interface in question. Or perhaps you meet someone you can ask. What you should not do, is simply run the text through Google Translate, or you may end up with some very confused users. You have been warned.

Step 1: Put your .nib and .xib into Base.lproj

In order for the translation to work, we have to put the files that need translation into a special subfolder. This collection of original untranslated files is referred to as the Base. Hence, the subfolder will be called Base.lproj, because it is the Base of our language project.

Okay, here we go. Go into your plug-in by right-clicking it and choosing Show Package Contents from the context menu. From there, navigate to Contents > Resources. You should find your plugin.py, your IBdialog.nib and IBdialog.xib there. In case you made a more sophisticated UI, there will be more .nib and .xib files.

1. Determine the Base. Select all .nib and .xib files:

2. Collect the Base in a subfolder. Right-click and choose New Folder with Selection from the top of the context menu that pops up:

3. Name the Base subfolder. Rename the newly-created folder to Base.lproj:

   Pay attention: the name is case-sensitive, so uppercase B, and the rest is lowercase.

The Base.lproj folder is the basis, and now we will add language-specific .lproj folders that contain the translations for the Base. But first, we will create the English .lproj. Yes, you read right, English.

Step 2: Add English .lproj folder

Why do we need an English language project folder? After all, the plug-in already is in English. So one would think you would need only the translations anymore. Well, not quite. The point is that the Base is not supposed to change anymore, or as little as possible, because what you will want to avoid at all cost is that the IDs change. (You will read about IDs further on in this tutorial.) That means if you change the English text at a later point, e.g., because you want to correct a typo, you will do that in the .lproj file, not in the .xib/.nib anymore.

1. Create the language folder: Next to the Base.lproj folder you just created, add one folder called en.lproj:

2. Add .strings file for each .nib file: Then fire up your favourite text editor, like Atom, SublimeText or TextMate, create a new file and save it inside the en.lproj folder with the name IBdialog.strings:

   The name must be the same as the .nib file in Base.lproj. Again, the name is case-sensitive, uppercase IB, lowercase dialog, and the .strings suffix.

   If you have other .xib/.nib files besides IBdialog, please add corresponding .strings files, one for each .nib.

That’s it in step 2. If you have done everything right, it will look approximately like this:

So far, so good. But an empty .strings file is of not much use. Let’s add some content. So do not close the file yet.

Step 3: Populate English .strings file

What we need to do now is tell the plug-in that certain text elements get new text content. In order to do that, we have to identify the element with an ID, and assign one of its attributes, typically the title, a new text string.

1. Finding the ID: Open the .xib file in Base.lproj with Xcode and select the text cells that need translation. Attention: Make sure you actually select the text field cell, not just the text field. This is important because field and cell have different IDs. I.e., open the triangle symbols in the Dialog sidebar on the left side. You can also see it by the way the element is highlighted, see the screenshot below.

   Then, with the text cell still selected, choose the Identity Inspector in the right sidebar (the third icon there). Now look for the Document pane in the sidebar, and select and copy the Object ID. Paste the ID in your .strings file. It is a good idea to add a description, or the original English text, in a comment between /* and */, so you know what the ID refers to without opening the .xib file again. So, for now, it will look like this in your .strings file:

   /* "Offset" */
   STH-Ua-fbl

   Do the same for all other text cells in the dialog. If you have placeholders or tool tips associated with the Object ID, consider adding those as well.
    

2. Find the attribute: The Object ID refers to the object, but what we want to do is assign new values to some of its attributes in the context of different language settings. In plain English, we want to translate (=assign new values to) one or more of the text strings (=attributes) attached to the text field cell (=object).

   In order to determine the proper keyword for your attribute, take a look in the Identity Inspector (3rd icon above the right sidebar) or Attributes Inspector (4th icon), and transform the names you see there into camelcase (starting with a lowercase letter), and you have the keywords of your attributes. E.g., Tool Tip becomes toolTip, Title becomes title, Placeholer becomes placeholder.

   You can see there are many other attributes there as well, and you can access them the same way. But usually, for a translation, only the ones that carry text will make sense to include in your .strings file.
    

3. Clean up your .strings code. The content of the .strings file must be in C notation, so our code will have to be transformed like this:

   /* "Offset" */
   "STH-Ua-fbl.title" = "Offset";

   1. Add the attribute as a dot suffix to the ID: STH-Ua-fbl.title
   2. Wrap the suffixed ID in dumb quotes: "STH-Ua-fbl.title"
   3. Append an equals sign: =
   4. Append the assigned text between dumb quotes: "Offset"
   5. At the end of the line, add a semicolon: ;
   6. Double check if your comment is between /* and */

   Do this for all attributes you want to translate. If you have done everything right, your text editor will help you with syntax coloring, and it will look something like this:

Again, an object may have more than one attribute you want to translate. Our example might just as well look like this:

/* "Offset" */
"STH-Ua-fbl.title" = "Offset";
"STH-Ua-fbl.toolTip" = "Width of the shape contour";

That is it for step 3. Keep in mind that, in the future, you should make your changes in this .strings file, not in the .xib anymore.

Step 4: Create non-English .lproj folders

Now that we have the Base and the English language project set up, we need a language project folder for each language we want to support. They are exactly the same as the en.lproj folder we already created, except that, in our .strings file, we will add the translation for the respective language.

Pro tip: Since you will find yourself opening .strings file a lot, consider always opening them with your text editor of choice. Open the file info in Finder (Cmd-I or Cmd-Opt-I), choose your preferred app under Open with:, and click the Change All… button.

Okay, here we go:

1. Create the language-specific language project folders. In Finder, select the en.lproj folder and duplicate it (File > Duplicate, Cmd-D), then rename the new folder to the two-letter ISO 639-1 language code followed by the .lproj suffix:

2. Add the translations. Inside each .lproj, open the .strings files and change the text between dumb quotes on the right side of the equals sign.

Some advice: If you do not speak the language, consider sending the .lproj folder to a user of your plug-in who does and ask them to translate the strings for you. If you do not know anyone, consider a forum post requesting help. For plug-ins, there is usually very little text to translate and it is easy to find someone who will do the favour for free, especially if the plug-in you offer is free as well. If it is commercial, consider offering a free copy of your plug-in in return.

You can add any language of course. First and foremost however, consider the languages that Glyphs.app is localized for already. That way, you can enable a smoother UI experience for users in these languages:

• cs: Czech
• de: German
• en: English
• es: Spanish
• fr: French
• it: Italian
• ja: Japanese
• ko: Korean
• pt: Portuguese
• ru: Russian
• tr: Turkish
• zh_CN: Chinese (simplified, mainland China)
• zh-Hant: Chinese (traditional, Taiwan)

You can see that Chinese appears twice in the list, with two different suffixes. That is because it needs to be differentiated into its two possible script variants: simplified and traditional. The former is written in mainland China, the latter on Taiwan/ROC.
 

Step 5: Re-compile the .xib once

One more thing remains to be done. Since we transformed our plug-in into a localized project differentiating between Base and language-specific customisations, we need to compile the .xib to a .nib again.

You probably know the drill: Open the Base.lproj folder in Terminal.app, type ibtool IBdialog.xib --compile IBdialog.nib and press the Return key. Or, better yet, drag the .xib file on the Compile .xib to .nib.app provided for your convenience in the GlyphsSDK repository.

Pro tip: You can set Compile .xib to .nib.app as the default app for opening .xib files. Then all you need to do is double click the .xib, and you are done.

The good news: You only need to do this once. All future additions and changes to the translations only need to be specified in the .strings files, and you’re good. High five!

Step 6: Localize texts in your Python code

Did we forget something? Yes we did. If you wrote your plug-in in Python, there probably are some strings in your .py file that need to be translated as well: typically the menu name, probably the word on the button, and perhaps als the context menu if your plug-in has one.

In this case, we can keep it inside the .py file. Simply replace all your strings (including Unicode strings) with a Glyphs.localize() function. The localize() function takes a dict as an argument, where the dict keys are the two-letter language codes, and the corresponding values the translations, preferably as Unicode strings.

To give you an example, you would turn this:

self.menuName = 'Shadow'

… into this:

self.menuName = Glyphs.localize({
    'en': u'Shadow',
    'de': u'Schatten',
    'fr': u'Ombreur',
    'nl': u'Schaduw',
    'es': u'Sombrear',
})

Note the u in front of the strings. It will turn the string in a Unicode string. You need this if the translation contains non-ASCII characters. It does not hurt to stay on the safe side, and always add them, though. If you use Unicode strings in your .py file, it may be a good idea to declare the encoding at the beginning of your file, like this:

# encoding: utf-8

By the way, this also works with all your regular Python scripts outside the realm of plug-ins. It even integrates nicely with vanilla code. Pretty cool.

OK, I think that’s it. You now have all the tools for localizing your plug-ins in your hands. Once you get the hang of it, it is some kind of geek fun and you will find it hard to stop. So, feel free to go localize your hearts out. :-)

Test the Localization

In order to test the localization, first make sure you unchecked Glyphs > Preferences > User Settings > Disable Localization. Otherwise you will not be able to switch Glyphs into a different language.

Then go to System Preferences > Language & Region, and drag the languages you want to test on top of the list. If the language does not show up, add it with the plus button. For instance, to test the Spanish localization, add Spanish to the list, and drag it on top, like so:

To confirm your changes, simply close System Preferences again. I dialog will ask you if you want restart your Mac. You do not want to restart your Mac.

You do want to restart Glyphs.app, though.

Pro tip: Quickest way to restart the app is to right-click its Dock icon, hold down the Option key, press the down arrow, which should select Force Quit in the Dock menu, and (do not release the Option key yet!) confirm by pressing the Return key. You just killed Glyphs.app, now you can restart it again. Since your mouse pointer is already over the app icon, simply press the mouse button to make it jump back into existence again. With a little practice, this takes one or two seconds only.

After startup, Glyphs is running in Spanish! Look for your plug-in under the Filtros or Vista menus. Its name should have changed to whatever you españolified self.menuName to. And voilà:

Troubleshooting

Okay, I cannot lie to you, there is always something that will go wrong. If the translation does not show up and you are lost along the way, these few tips will help you spot the problem quickly:

• Not the right object: Did you make sure you are referencing the correct object with the ID you found out? Most typically, you accidentally used the ID that points to the text field, not the text field cell. Make sure that you drill down far enough in the Dialog section of the Xcode sidebar. Look here, the one with the loving smiley is the one you want:
• ID has changed: Did you make changes to the .xib? Perhaps replaced one of the text fields with a new object or pasted one from another .xib in? Chances are the IDs have changed. You will need to both recompile the .xib and especially verify the Object IDs again.
• Forgot the semicolon: In the .strings file, after every assignment, you must put in a semicolon. Cannot spare you that one, I am sorry.
• Recompiled once? Did you recompile the .xib after you added Base.lproj? It does not cost anything to do the compilation once more, so you may want to do that anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Typostammtisch Zürich: «Für den letzten Typostammtisch dieses Jahres erwarten wir Besuch aus Österreich!»

24. Typostammtisch Zürich

• When?

  Donnerstag, 13. Dezember 2018
  ab 19:00 Uhr

• Who?

  Rainer Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  Atelier von Roland Dill
  Flüelastrasse 10, Zürich

• How much?

  Free.

• For whom?
• Prerequisites
• Links

  typozueri.ch

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer hat Fotografie, Philosophie und Niederländisch studiert und dann festgestellt, dass seine wahre Leidenschaft im Typedesign, Unterrichten und Coden liegt. Seit 2012 arbeitet er am Schrifteditor «Glyphs» mit, für den er auch Tutorials verfasst und Workshops gibt – so auch Mitte Dezember in Zürich. Wir freuen uns sehr, dass Rainer vorher noch beim Typostammtisch vorbeischaut und über experimentelle OpenType-Features berichten wird.

Welcome to Glyphs 2.6, which first and foremost is a free maintenance update for macOS 10.14 Mojave. And as part of that, we are thrilled to present to you Glyphs—in Dark Mode:

Isn’t it a beauty?

But I suppose you know us already well enough that you can guess we did a little more than just that. We added many, many improvements, fixes, enhancements, accelerations and whatnot. Read on for a little overview of what’s new in the latest version of Glyphs.

Speed, Speed, Speed

Oh boy, have we put the pedal to the metal… We were able to restructure the way both Edit and Font views are drawn on the screen. Now, screen drawing makes full use of the latest and greatest graphics capabilities in macOS, so you should see a significant performance increase when scrolling through the Font tab, or with a lot of text in an Edit tab. The same is true for a number of batch edits. And if your machine has a lot of processor cores, well, put on your seat belt and see for yourself.

Selecting Segments

Small addition, big change in your workflow: You can now select outline segments. Click, boom, it’s that easy. No modifier keys, no nothing, just click on it:

And of course, you can Shift-click to add or remove segments from your selection.

Variable Fonts

We debuted it at ATypI Antwerp earlier this year: you can now make color variable fonts with Glyphs! Even Brace layers are supported, haha. Believe it or not, this is (an animated GIF of) a font:

What do you have to do to achieve it?

1. In Font Info > Masters, set up the color palette like you would for a CPAL/COLR font.
2. Create ‘normal’ black and white variable glyphs, with brace layers and everything you need for the various parts you want to move (in the Pong example, the background, ball and bats)
3. In a new glyph, insert them as components, but on different Color layers.

4. Drag the Color layers in the right order, and you’re done. Ta-daa!

We renamed the custom parameter Variation Font Origin to the more consistent Variable Font Origin. The old name should still work, but please update your files accordingly anyway. Plus, we added two new parameters:

• Variable Font File Name (or the equivalent variableFileName) lets you set the file name of the exported font.
• variableStyleName sets the default style name of your variable font. This makes most sense if you do not have any instances set. If you do not set anything, it will default to ‘Regular’.

What else happened in Variable Font Land? We added mkmk mark-to-mark attachment GPOS variation, improved kerning in variable fonts containing three or more axes, and improved GPOS export with extension lookups. And while we were at it. we significantly improved the variation of anchors from components. Many thanks to Filip Blažek for pointing that one out to us.

Reusing Shapes

From now on, when you create _corner glyphs for use as corner components, they will default to a narrower advance width of 200, rather than the usual 600. This makes more sense for the partial outlines that corner components are, and it will keep your Edit view from cluttering up in case you find yourself working with a bunch of them.

You can make variants of your base letters with suffixes like .topAccent or .bottomAccent, then this letter will be preferred for generating compounds with marks that make use of the indicated anchor. I know, sounds complicated, so here is an example. Say you have a lowercase g with a funky ear. Very nice, but it may get in the way of top accents in compound glyphs like gcommaaccent, gcaron or gdotaccent. So you can duplicate your g, name it g.topAccent and flatten its ear, perhaps like this:

The next time you create a g compound that has a top-connecting mark, say gcircumflex, the .topAccent variant will be preferred for the base:

You can also combine multiple anchors in one such suffix. Make sure they are (a) camel-cased and (b) in alphabetical order, .e.g., .bottomTopAccent, .bottomOgonekAccent or hornToprightAccent.

One more thing about components: When you save a file with Cmd-S, Glyphs will update the component positions for all auto-aligned compound glyphs.

Masters and Interpolation

I have four pieces of news for you. Admittedly, they are all a little geeky, but if you work with multiple masters, you will love them:

1. If you merge fonts via Font Info > Masters > Plus menu > Add Font as Master, all secondary (non-interpolating, non-master) layers are preserved now.
2. You can now use the Layers palette’s Re-interpolate function on multiple selected glyphs at once. It will then reinterpolate the layers of the currently selected master.
3. The Layers palette now has an option called Re-interpolate Metrics, and it does what it says. It leaves paths, anchors and components alone, but updates LSB and RSB in the selected layer(s).
4. You can now add more than one master at once in Font Info > Masters > Plus menu > Add Other Font.

By the way, have you been using the mekkablue script Masters > Insert Instances? Update it, please, it has recently gotten a lot better: It can now populate the style name fields with natural names and set weight classes and style linking too.

Color Fonts

We improved sbix support: You now have better control over image positioning, you can better import sbix fonts into Glyphs, and export has been optimised as well. Oh, and the sbix picture is previewed in the proper relative size, no matter whether you are editing an iColor layer or whether you are in text mode:

iColor glyphs are now also better supported in Font View:

Too much to swallow at once? No problem, we have updated the sbix tutorial for your laid-back reading pleasure.

• We also improved SVG color font support, no matter which method you use.
• Color layers are now included in View > Show Master Compatibility. (And yeah, you guessed it, they’re interpolated as well.)
• Glyphs tries to stay on an equivalent Color layer when switching between glyphs with Home/End (or fn-left/right) keys. Provided, of course, that both glyphs have the same or similar Color layer structure. That makes it much easier to edit the same color when stepping through the glyphs.
• Import and export of alpha values for colors has been improved.
• More intelligible error reporting when loading SVGs.

TrueType

We have some pretty cool TrueType improvements in store for you. For one thing, View > Show Master Compatibility now works like a charm with quadratic curves.

A custom parameter called TTZoneRoundingThreshold, which you can set in Font Info > Font or Font Info > Instance (the latter takes precedence, of course), controls the likelihood of a zone being pushed up a pixel. It takes a small decimal number as value, typically something around 0.1 or 0.2. The value is added to any positive zone position before rounding, and added twice to the x-height zone (the one named xHeight in the TrueType zones). If you do not set it, a default of 0.09375 is assumed.

Example: At a certain font size, the smallcap zone ends up at 6.45 pixels, and the x-height at 5.25 pixels. Without any change, the smallcap zone would round and snap to a height of 6 pixels, while the x-height would end up with 5 pixels. But you set a TTZoneRoundingThreshold of 0.2, so the smallcap height ends up at (6.45+0.2=6.65≈) 7 pixels, and the x-height at (5.25+2×0.2=5.65≈) 6 pixels.

You can trigger conversion between quadratic and cubic outlines now also in Font view. Just select a number of glyphs, or all of them, and run Paths > Other > Convert to Cubic, or Quadratic, respectively. Now you can batch-convert your heart out, have fun. Speaking of which, TT conversion has been improved further, and among other things, inflection points are now added automatically to your TrueType outline.

Many little things were improved in the TrueType Instructor tool (shortcut I). A big round of applause to Noe Blanco who shared her invaluable input with us. More improvements are in the pipeline.

And there is a new hidden setting called TTPreviewAlsoShowOffCurveIndexes that switches on display of all point index numbers. Simply run Glyphs.defaults["TTPreviewAlsoShowOffCurveIndexes"]=True in Window > Macro Panel and switch to the TT Instructor tool (I):

This can be handy, e.g., if you need the point indexes for writing TTF Autohint Control Instructions. Speaking of Werner Lemberg’s TTF Autohint, we fixed a few issues and integrated its latest version into the app. In other words, --stem-width-mode is now supported, and strong stems work better now.

Back to Glyphs’ own TT instructioning. You can now add a TTMinimumDistance custom parameter to your instance in File > Font Info > Instances. The default is 0.25, which means that any hinted stem will be drawn with a minimum length of a quarter pixel, no matter which PPM size, if it has a stem hint applied to it. If you are not happy with the default of 0.25 pixels, you can set your own minimum distance (in pixels) with this parameter. This value kicks in at small pixel sizes, where small parts are in danger of disappearing.

Also, TrueType instructions now use a hardcoded control value cut-in, which basically means that hinting is deactivated in bigger sizes. More precisely, it will prevent outline distortions if the effective change results in something bigger than (97÷64=) 1.515625 screen pixels.

You can automatically add TT Instructor hints from within the Font tab. To do so, switch to Edit view and choose the TrueType Instructor tool (I), then switch back to Font view (Cmd-Opt-1), select some glyphs, right-click and choose Autohint TrueType from the context menu:

And it even gets better than that: When you run the Autohint TrueType command from the context menu, be it in Font or Edit view, it will also add vertical stem hints. But it only does so if you have vertical TT hints (‘x-direction’) defined in the TTF Stems parameter in Font Info > Masters.

Also, TT hints now work better on outline intersections and in corner components. If you ran into issues before, please give it another try. In further news, delta export, TTF Stems import, and the hinting preview in the TT Instructor (I) have been improved. Overall, TTF export is much snappier now.

Doing stuff with AAT? You’ll be happy to hear that Glyphs now uses the new default location of ftxenhancer app: /usr/local/bin/ftxenhancer. Or you can set your own path with the GSftxenhancerPath preferences. Paste the following line into Window > Macro Panel and press Run:

Glyphs.defaults["GSftxenhancerPath"]="/Applications/Utilities/ftxenhancer"

Needless to say, adapt the path to the right of the equal sign to wherever you have put your ftxenhancer.

Encodings, Languages, Scripts and Localisations

Portuguese, Korean, French and Chinese app localisations have been greatly improved. And while we are at it, it is not only the localisations, but also an increasing number of tutorials that are available in French and Chinese! Many thanks to Nathalie Dumont as well as Liu Zhao and her students for their continued, fantastic input.

But, so many more things happened here, it is hard even for ourselves to keep track. To give you just a few highlights:

• The Chinese sidebar has been subcategorised with the most useful groups of glyphs:
  ‌
  And while we were at it, we also improved sorting for Chinese. And with the help of the nice students at the Gengdan Institute, we were able to update a few UI translations, including some plug-ins in Window > Plugin Manager. Special thanks to Yang Xicheng, Liu Yezhao, Dake, Neil and many others who helped so nicely, xièxie!
• Bopomofo is now treated (and listed) among the CJK scripts.
• The Korean sidebar is updated with the latest Adobe-KR and traditional KS X 1001 codepages. This comes with an adapted Korean cmap and the new ROS:
  ‌
  Many thanks to Minjoo Ham, Aaron Bell, Daekwon Kim, Han Hyewon and all the other nice people at Sandoll for their invaluable input!
• Hangul glyphs can now be auto-aligned as well.
• Improved Bulgarian Cyrillic sidebar entries, thanks to Krista Radoeva and Botio Nikolchev.
• Khmer: sidebar and GlyphData are improved, and mark positioning has been overhauled as well. Thanks to Ben Mitchell and Sovichet Tep for their input!
• Devanagari sidebar and GlyphData has been improved, thanks to Kimya Gandhi and Rob Keller.
• We added Uppercase Georgian to the glyph database.
• More Canadian native languages have been added to the GlyphData.
• Much better handling of marks inside an Arabic sample string.
• Glyphs now keeps not only Unicode values but also names for Private Use Area glyphs.
• Double encodings in CID-keyed fonts now work as expected.
• Plane 16 Unicode values (U+100000 through U+10FFFF) are handled properly now.
• More scripts are now recognised and treated as RTL, e.g., oldHungarian and phoenician.
• Improved filtering of kerning between different scripts (thanks Fritze).
• Many improvements have been made in the vertical layout mode.

Whoa, that was a lot, and we didn’t even scratch the surface, I can assure you. To sum it up, especially if you find yourself working with Asian scripts, you will notice an improvement, one way or another.

Font View

In the Font tab (Cmd-Opt-1), one of the most important functions is filtering the glyph set to what you need to see for your next task. We have two great pieces of news about list and smart filters for you. They may seem insignificant at first, but may have quite an impact on your workflow. Read on.

You can now add plain unicode characters in list filters. Instead of spelling out the glyph name, simply type the character with your keyboard (or whatever input method you prefer).

If there is a glyph with the Unicode assigned, it will be shown when filtered. If added from the list, it will create the corresponding glyph. It’s that easy.

We improved and added Smart Filter options:

• Has Hints: now only applies to actual TT and PS hints (i.e., ignores corner and cap components, which technically are implemented as hints).
• Has PostScript Hints: if set to Yes, lists glyphs with PS-style manual hints (stem and ghost hints).
• Has TrueType Hints: if set to Yes, lists glyphs with manual TT hints, added with the TrueType Instructor tool (I).

• Has Corners: if set to Yes, lists glyphs that contain corner components.

The sidebar has a new category: Number > Small Figures. It contains figures ending in superior or inferior and will list other small figures with .subs, .sinf and subs suffixes. And the Number > Fraction category now actually also contains the fraction glyph. Duh.

You can now print the glyph grid in Font view directly from Finder: Select the .glyphs file, and choose File > Print or simply press Cmd-P. The file will quickly open in Glyphs, the print job will be sent off to your most recent printer, and the file closes again. Handy if you need glyph overviews of multiple files. Thanks to Jürgen for the suggestion. And with the help of your input (special thanks to Jelle), we could improve the printing output for most printers.

In further news, we were able to improve Font view layout in certain circumstances (thanks Inka!), and thus get rid of a couple of occasional glitches.

Edit view

To make the glyph names more legible, we are now using a variant of the system font with more legible shapes for characters that can easily be mistaken for others, like the uppercase I, the lowercase l and the zero. Especially in Font view, but also in the kerning panel and the grey info box in Edit view, this will help you spot typos:

You can now paste or drag image data into Edit view, and as soon as you press Cmd-S for saving, Glyphs will generate a corresponding image file in a subfolder called Images next to the .glyphs file. Glyphs is smart enough to use unique file names, so images do not get overwritten.

• The Select Glyphs window (the one you see, e.g., when you insert a glyph with Cmd-F) is resizable now.
• Global guides now also show in Brace and Bracket layers.
• Fixed: when a glyph is duplicated in Edit view, the production name is not duplicated anymore.
• Glyphs with too many nodes will trigger a warning dialog.
• Better display of invalid PostScript hints. It was sometimes hard to select way-off hints, and delete them. Not anymore.

OpenType Features

In File > Font Info > Features, all features (provided you do not mistype the feature tag, of course) are listed with their proper full plain-English name now, as described on the Microsoft Typography page:

And again, many small things were improved under the hood. Handling of some features has been improved, including aalt, for instance. Many language- or script-specific automatic feature code snippets have been added and improved. See above for more details.

Oh, and we managed to improve the automatic generation of the mark positioning features, and thus were able to prevent most cases of subtable overflows. If you can still trigger an overflow with one of your files, we are very interested in taking a look at the file. Bring ’em on.

Import and Export

We have completely rephrased the text of what we call the import validation dialog. Yes, the one that appears when you open a font file containing components whose alignment is not explicitly specified, most likely old .glyphs files:

We hope it is much clearer now. Thank you for everyone who gave us good feedback in the forum, especially Dave, Norbert and Toshi!

Speaking of which, import validation will now happen on all imported files, including UFO and TTF. Yeah, I know it can be a pretty pesky dialog, but it is necessary for preventing – or fixing – unwanted component shifts, and thus keeping you in control.

As you can see in the screenshot, the import validation dialog will now indicate the exact layers on which shifts will happen. And, more importantly, it will preselect component shifts that are medium (10+ units) and big (100+ units). Assuming that small shifts are errors in need of correcting, and bigger shifts are more likely to be intentional, you can now go through the dialog really quickly.

Do we have more import/export improvements? You bet. here’s a quick rundown:

• Improved copying and pasting outlines between Glyphs and Affinity Designer. If you are a convert, you can finally drop Illustrator now.
• Glyphs will now happily import many compiled fonts at once. As many as you can throw at it.
• When you import an existing compiled OpenType font, Glyphs now does a much better job reverse-engineering the feature code for contextual substitutions.
• Generally, importing OpenType feature code has been improved. Any glitches you encountered previously should now be things of the past.
• largely improved .designspace file import, especially the import of kerning.
• Glyphs now both reads ad writes display strings to UFO files. This enables you to keep your sample texts when you have to commit to a UFO workflow.

Scripting and Extending

After you press the Install Modules button in Glyphs > Preferences > Addons > Modules, you will now see a checkmark once installation is complete. Better than just waiting for the spinning beachball to stop spinning, eh?

Oh, if you do Python stuff and have not had a look at docu.glyphsapp.com recently, please stop by again. Why? The documentation got an update and a little reformatting, all links should work now as expected.

• We added an Update button to the vanilla warning dialog, so you can update right away, and don’t have to go digging in the Preferences.
• You can now access GSFont.axes and GSFontMaster.axes.
• Do you have a plug-in of yours listed in Window > Plugin Manager? You can now insert links in the description texts. HTML and Markdown are supported.
• Added Variable Font and UFO support to the Python export function: font.export(Format=VARIABLE/UFO) and instance.generate(Format=UFO). Have fun.
• Improved handling of callbacks in reporter plug-ins.

… and a few more improvements and bug fixes in the Python wrapper. Thanks to all script and plug-in coders who provide us with valuable feedback!

Hidden Preferences

Some cool new geeky stuff can be triggered with a little Python magic:

Glyphs.defaults["TTPreviewAlsoShowOffCurveIndexes"] = True
Glyphs.defaults["GSShowVersionNumberInDockIcon"] = True
Glyphs.defaults["GSFontViewDarkMode"] = False

And to get rid of them again, either use the same code with False instead of True (and vice versa). Or use the new mekkablue script App > Set Hidden App Preferences. Or, simply delete the defaults, like this:

del Glyphs.defaults["TTPreviewAlsoShowOffCurveIndexes"]
del Glyphs.defaults["GSShowVersionNumberInDockIcon"]
del Glyphs.defaults["GSFontViewDarkMode"]

But what do these settings do, you ask? Fair enough, here is a quick rundown of what they do:

• TTPreviewAlsoShowOffCurveIndexes (off by default): shows all TT point indexes, including off-curves. See above.
   
• GSShowVersionNumberInDockIcon (off by default): shows the version number in the Dock icon. Useful when you find yourself switching between app versions a lot. I think it compliments GSShowVersionNumberInTitleBar (introduced in 2.5) really well:

   

• GSFontViewDarkMode (on by default): if set to False, disables dark mode for the glyph grid in Font view. Useful for those among you who like Mojave Dark Mode, but want to keep all their glyphs black on white. This is what it looks like:

Small Things and Big Thanks

As always, many small details have been improved, tiny bugs squished, potential causes for rare crashes fixed. Each one of them, by itself, perhaps too small to mention in a separate paragraph, but in total making for a better experience using the software on a daily basis.

To give you just one example, we improved undoing (Cmd-Z) in many situations, e.g., after Filter > Fix Compatibility, after decomposing nested components, after changing OpenType classes and prefixes in File > Font Info > Features, and after changing zones and stems in File > Font Info > Masters.

Or here is another one I love, because it helps us spot mistakes much quicker. After entering a URL in one of the respective fields in File > Font Info > Font, Glyphs will validate the entry and display a warning:

And we cannot state this enough: As much as Glyphs is a small business that puts bread on the table for half a dozen hard-working people, it has also become a community. And yes, that means you, the Glyphs users. Without your insights, suggestions, input, feedback, bug and crash reports, Glyphs would not be what it is today. Therefore, a big thank you for all your contributions, e-mails, personal conversations, and active participations in one of the industry’s most active web forums.

So, thank you, and keep it coming, please.

Sample Font in Mojave Dark Mode screenshots: Antonia, an upcoming Typejockeys release.

Every Thursday this Semester, Reading graduate Matthias Pauwels will give a type design course at SfG Basel. In town? Do not miss this.

Semester course: Type Design and Lettering

• When?

  Thursdays 17:30 - 20:45
  24.01.2019 - 27.06.2019

• Who?

  Matthias Pauwels

• Where?

  SfG Basel
  Room: G203/204

• How much?

  Preis: 520,00 CHF
  Reduzierter Preis: 200,00 CHF

• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled.

• Links

  Course description at SfG Basel site

Kursziel: Der Kurs bietet AnfängerInnen sowie Fortgeschrittenen die Möglichkeit, eine eigene Schrift zu entwickeln.

Kursinhalt: Wir lernen manuelle und digitale Techniken zur Schriftgestaltung kennen und erproben diese in einem eigenen Projekt. Dabei setzen wir uns intensiv mit Designprozessen auseinander, die essentiell sind, um eine Schriftfamilie von Grund auf zu gestalten, eine charakteristische Display-Schrift oder Schriftbilder (sogenannte Letterings) zu kreieren. Die Software Glyphs unterstützt uns beim Designprozess. Sie ermöglicht das Erstellen von Desktop- sowie Webfonts und lädt uns dazu ein, neue technologische Möglichkeiten wie z.B. «variable fonts" auszuprobieren. Gemeinsam erarbeiten wir auch geschichtliche Zusammenhänge, die das Abbild heutiger Schriften nach wie vor beeinflussen und erklären. Dabei lernen wir Buchstaben als abstrakte Formen wahrzunehmen, um deren visuelle Eigenheiten zu verstehen.

‘Glyphs è apprezzato oltre che per la sua completezza, anche per l’interfaccia semplice e chiara che lo rendono uno dei migliori strumenti per il type design. Con type design is intende tutto quello che riguarda la progettazione di un carattere tipografico, dall’ideazione alla realizzazione.’

We have nothing to add to that. Except that course participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Corso di Glyphs

• When?

  3 Marzo, 10.00 – 17.00

• Who?

  Leo Colalillo

• Where?

  Milano (da definire)

• How much?

  EUR 190

• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  • Conoscenza degli strumenti per il disegno vettoriale
  • Mac OS X 10.9.5 o successivo

• Links

  Corso di Glyphs (FB event)

1. Introduzione al software
   • Cos’è Glyphs
   • Potenzialità
   • Risorse
2. Strumenti
   • Forme base
   • Gestione delle curve di Bézier
   • Selezione e movimento
   • Strumenti di modifica
   • Guide e zone di allineamento
   • Componenti (accenti)
3. Funzioni
   • Legature e glifi extra latini
   • Filtri
   • Livelli
   • Trasformazioni
   • Importazione da Illustrator e Fontself
4. Master e finalizzazione
   • Master
   • Istanze e Interpolazioni
   • Variable Fonts
   • Esportazione

Learn how to create variable fonts with Glyphs! Glyphs core team member Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer will hold a Glyphs Magic Day in St. Petersburg. A unique chance for all local type designers to be able to learn all the unique features of Glyphs.

Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Создание Вариативных Шрифтов в Glyphs вместе с Райнером Эрихом Шайхельбауэром

• When?

  8 February

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  Аптекарский проспект
  дом 2, литера З, офис 7
  St.Petersburg

• How much?

  Early bird pricing available:
  RUB 9900 until 27 Jan
  RUB 12000 until 03 Feb
  RUB 15000 until 07 Feb

• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled.

• Links

Learn how to:

• create a variable font from scratch
• convert an existing Multiple Master setup into a Variable Font
• prepare outlines for glyph variations
• trace down and fix errors, avoid potential pitfalls
• optional settings (custom parameters)
• useful scripts and plug-ins for the workflow
• export and test in AI and web browsers
• animate a glyph in a web browser

You will be taken through a Variable Font workflow, with ample opportunity for questions and feedback. That means that also Multiple Master technology and interpolation in general will be addressed, and the small details that can make a difference.

Plus more Glyphs Magic:

• color fonts: let your letters shine
• reusing shapes with corner components
• saving time with custom parameters

We are happy to support the Berlin Letters Festival, and we will be present, among other things, with an introductory workshop!

Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Glyphs: Introduction to Type Design with Sol Matas

• When?

  Saturday, 18 May 2019
  10:00 – 18:00

• Who?

  Sol Matas

• Where?

  Colonia Nova
  Thiemannstrasse 1
  Tor 4, Haus 5, Aufgang 1
  12059 Berlin-Neukölln

• How much?

  EUR 120

• For whom?

  This workshop is suitable for designers and those in love with typography. You don’t need to have any previous experience in type design, but you will have a better time if you have some experience drawing Bézier vectors (e.g., with Adobe apps such as Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop)

  Max 16 participants.

• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled.

• Links

  All info on the Berlin Letters site

In this one day session, you will be introduced to the type design process and you will have the essential technical knowledge to start your own font. You will create a font from scratch and after attending this workshop you will be able to continue the work on your font by yourself.

Contents:
• Sketching
• Basics of drawing
• Digitizing, adding diacritical marks
• Spacing and kerning
• Generating the font and testing it in Adobe apps

For the first time, TypeCal is taking place in Kuwait. There will be plenty of Glyphs workshops, do not miss out on this!

Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Workshop: Make your own Color Font in Glyphs

• When?

  Thursday 7 March 2019
  12:00 - 16:00

• Who?

  Rainer Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  t.b.a.

• How much?
• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled.

• Links

In this fun workshop, learn how to make color fonts of all sorts in Glyphs, and how to implement them. Bonus trick: put your selfie into a font!

You will learn about:

• color font formats: SVG, COLR/CPAL, sbix
• creation in Glyphs
• implementation in current design software and in web browsers

Workshop: Make your own Variable Font Animation in Glyphs

• When?

  Friday, 8 March 2019
  14:00 – 18:00

• Who?

  Rainer Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  t.b.a.

• How much?
• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled.

• Links

In this fun workshop, you will learn how to draw an emoji in glyphs, and get it to animate in a web browser!

You will learn about:

• variable font setup and export
• implementation in a web browser
• basic HTML/CSS for OTVar animation

Crash Course: Arabic in Glyphs

• When?

  March 2019
  t.b.a.

• Who?

  Rainer Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  t.b.a.

• How much?
• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled.

• Links

In this 4-hour intensive workshop, you will create Arabic glyphs and make them work in the font editor as well as in third-party apps.

You will learn about:

• setting up a Glyphs file for Arabic
• drawing and constructing Arabic letters and marks
• implementing Arabic OT features
• testing your Arabic font

Meet us at EDCH Salon 2019 in mid-March in Munich!
More details to follow.

We are happy to support – and will be present at – Kirjak 2019 with two small workshops. The workshops are intertwined with two of Peter Bankov’s infamous rude style calligraphy sessions, in such a way that you will be able to visit both.

Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Workshop 1: Variable font magic with Glyphs

• When?

  Saturday, 13 April 2019
  Morning session, 3.5 hrs approx

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

• Where?
• How much?
• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled. No prior knowledge of type design required.

• Links

  Kirjak 2019

In this quick and fun workshop, you will learn how to draw a few letters and an emoji in Glyphs, then export the font, import it into a simple HTML and animate it in the browser!

Workshop 2: Digitise your analog letters

• When?

  Saturday, 13 April 2019
  Afternoon session, 3.5 hrs approx

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

• Where?
• How much?
• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your smartphone and your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled. No prior knowledge of type design required.

• Links

  Kirjak 2019

Whether you took the morning workshop with Peter Bankov, or if you have any sketches or whether it is simply your own handwriting: bring your analog letters, and turn them into a full-fledged OpenType font in this quick and fun workshop.

This intensive three-day workshop led by Stuart Sandler and Dathan Boardman of the world–renowned retro type foundry, Font Diner and co-founders of Font Seed, is perfect for designers and letterpress lovers alike who want to learn how to make their very first digital font!

Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Letterpress Font Making Workshop

• When?

  Begins: Friday 8 March (evening)
  Ends: Sunday 10 March
  This is a three-day workshop with a required Friday night event and participants must be prepared to attend both days and the event.

• Who?

  Stuart Sandler
  Dathan Boardman

• Where?

  Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
  1816 10th Street
  Two Rivers
  Wisconsin 54241

• How much?

  Space is limited, so reservations and a $125 non-refundable deposit when you sign up are required. The $100 to fulfill the full cost of $225 of the workshop will be due at the beginning of the workshop. (Lunch is available both Saturday and Sunday for $10 per person and includes a beverage.)

• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled and either Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. You must be 18 years or older. Bring comfortable shoes and clothes that may get ink on them while you print.

• Links

  All info and registration: FONT SEED LETTERPRESS FONT MAKING WORKSHOP

The workshop starts off with a Friday night letterpress printing party (7-9pm) where you’ll print and photograph your own specimen with wood type from Hamilton's amazing collection to use as your font reference for the workshop.

On Saturday (9am - 5pm) we’ll be totally focused on vector letter tracing/drawing basics using our scanned reference and our goal is to help you complete a set of 26 capital letters by the end of the day. Dinner is on your own and then join us for a fun evening group activity. On Sunday (9am–2pm), we’ll switch gears and spend the day importing your letters, spacing, kerning and generating your first font!

After lunch, you can keep cooking away on your font or enjoy the rest of the afternoon to print your own letterpress souvenir specimen poster from the original source and the day finishes up at 2:00 pm.

You’ll leave with a strong foundation of how to develop your own typefaces and how to expand on the font you’ve created at this workshop to use as you wish!

Whenever you want to use custom fonts on the web, you need webfonts. And whenever you make webfonts, file size is your main concern. The smaller the better. A well-subsetted single-script webfont should clock in below 20K.

Format Overview

I told you above that file size is the primary issue. Number two on the list will be browser support. Unfortunately, not every web browser can handle every webfont file format. Glyphs can produce four kinds of webfonts: EOT, WOFF, WOFF2, and plain OpenType fonts (TTF/OTF). Here is a quick overview:

• EOT: Embedded OpenType. Internet Explorer only; necessary for versions 6-8 (current combined market share below 0.19%), versions 9 and later support WOFF. More info about EOT support. 
• WOFF: Web Open Font Format. Most widely supported format; Chrome 5, Firefox 3.6, IE9, Edge, Safari 5.1, Opera 11.1, Android WebKit 4.4, and all respective later versions. More info about WOFF support. 
• WOFF2: Web Open Font Format 2. Best compression, but browser support still limited; Chrome 36, Firefox 39, Safari 10 (macOS 10.13 High Sierra and iOS 11 and later only), Edge 14, Android Webkit 67, and Opera 23; not supported on IE, Opera Mini, Android UC, and BlackBerry. More info about WOFF2 support. 
• Plain OpenType: OTF and TTF. Fallback format for old browser versions that do not support WOFF yet: Chrome 4 (0%), Safari 3.2–5.0 (macOS and iOS, approx 0.02%), Opera 10.1–11.0 (0%), Android WebKit 2.2–4.3 (0.28%). More info about TTF support. 

You can pretty much safely ignore both EOT and plain OpenType. Yes, it does not hurt to implement them, but hey. As of this writing, a mere approximate half percent of web browsing may be done in browsers that necessitate these formats. Probably way less by the time you are reading this.

In other words, focus on WOFF and WOFF2. Now, read on.

Exporting Webfonts

Sure enough, to export the fonts you have set up in File > Font Info > Instances, you simply choose File > Export (Cmd-E) and pick the Webfont option in the top row. You are presented with this dialog sheet:

You basically need to make three decisions:

1. OpenType/CFF vs. TrueType: The radio buttons determine in which outline format the WOFF and WOFF2 fonts will be exported; EOTs are always TrueType. TrueType-based fonts use components for keeping the filesize small, PS-based fonts use a technology called subroutinisation. Complex outlines cannot be subroutinised. Windows has performance problems with complex PS outlines, and sometimes you will see a difference in screen rendering, especially with hinting (see following point). Best is to test WOFF and WOFF2 in both formats for file size and screen display quality, and then decide.

2. Autohinting: if activated, ttfAutohint will be used on EOT and TT-based WOFF/WOFF2, and Adobe’s autohinting algorithm will be applied to CFF-based WOFF/WOFF2, respectively. Complex fonts cannot be hinted.

3. WOFF, WOFF2, EOT: The file formats in which the files will be exported, as discussed above. The dialog does not offer the Plain variant. You can use the OTF option in the top row for that, or the custom parameter (see below) for overriding the GUI options. Or simply not care, because it is really not a useful format for the web.

And, well yes, actually the fourth decision, the Export Destination, is the same as in the usual OTF dialog sheet. You can preset a folder, which spares you the extra save dialog that follows otherwise. That can significantly speed up your export process, especially if you find yourself reexporting a lot in your quest to squeeze another kilobyte out of your WOFFs.

Custom Parameters

You can use the following parameters either in File > Font Info > Instances, or in a .glyphsproject file.

• Webfont Formats: This allows you to specify which formats will be exported of the instance in question. You must use this parameter if you are outsourcing webfont production into a .glyphsproject file. Always Pick WOFF and WOFF2 unless you know what you are doing. And maybe throw in legacy EOT and Plain TTF files.
• Webfont Only: Will fiddle with the tables inside the font in a way so that a rogue user will have difficulties reverse-engineering the OTF or TTF from the webfont. However, we do not recommend this. Use this parameter only if your client insists on this as an additional safety precaution.
• Save as TrueType: Forces the TrueType option of the export dialog.
• Autohint: Forces the Autohinting option of the export dialog.

But wait, there are more custom parameters available for your webfont geekery. Read on.

Subsetting

Subsetting refers to the removal of (unnecessary) glyphs from the font, thereby making the font a little smaller in terms of filesize. There are basically two mutually exclusive ways to achieve subsetting in Glyphs: either specifying which glyphs you want to keep, or which glyphs you want to get rid of. In both cases you take care of the subsetting with a custom parameter in File > Font Info > Font, or in a .glyphsproject file:

• Remove Glyphs: You supply a list of glyph names to specify which glyphs will not make it into the exported webfont. Simply type out all glyph names, separated by newlines.
• Keep Glyphs: same as above, except this time you specify which glyphs you want to export. All other glyphs in the font not mentioned in this parameter will not be exported.

In both cases, you can speed up things by using the Copy Glyph Names > One per Line command from the context menu in the Font tab (Cmd-Opt-1). And then paste your clipboard content into the parameter value. The only glyphs you cannot remove are .notdef and space.

And you can use the asterisk (*) as a wildcard, both at the beginning and end of a word. E.g., you may want to write ord* instead of spelling out ordfeminine and ordmasculine, or *.ss05 for all stylistic set 5 glyphs, or even *.ss* for all stylistic sets.

Even better, there are also key wildcards available. They allow you to add complete categories, subcategories and even scripts to the list of glyphs to be removed (or kept). A key wildcard consists of the case-sensitive glyph info key (script, unicode, category and subCategory), followed by an equals sign, which in turn is followed by an appropriate value for the key. Say you want to get rid of all Greek letters, all lowercase letters and all figures, so you add these lines to your Remove Glyphs parameter:

script=cyrillic
subCategory=Lowercase
category=Number

And you can combine the key wildcard with the asterisk. E.g., in order to delete all glyphs with Unicode values from U+0300 to U+04FF, you would add this to the parameter value:

unicode=03*
unicode=04*

OK, now that we have the tools for subsetting in our hands, what do we get rid of? Here are a few inspirations:

• Small caps: *.sc
• Figure variants: *.tf *.tosf *.osf *.lf
• Stylistic sets: *.ss*
• Character variants: *.cv*
• Ornaments: *.ornm
• Very rare, deprecated, unused or untypable letters: AEacute aeacute Aringacute aringacute IJ ij napostrophe Oslashacute oslashacute
• Localizations and compatibility glyphs: Tcedilla tcedilla Ldot ldot
• Rare symbols: lozenge paragraph currency florin logicalnot infinity integral product summation radical micro partialdiff perthousand registered trademark bar brokenbar dagger daggerdbl estimated apple
• Letters for languages that are not necessary on the website it is intended for. E.g., on that page dedicated to Dutch literature, you will very likely not need those extra glyphs that are only used in Esperanto, Ccircumflex ccircumflex Hcircumflex hcircumflex Jcircumflex jcircumflex.
• Letter of scripts that are not needed for the purpose of the font. Bulgarian webpage? You will need Cyrillic, maybe a little Latin, but probably not the Greek parts of the font, so you go: script=greek.

Anything else? Sure, but your mileage may vary. So, after export, always verify the glyph set and see if there is one more glyph you can take out. To do that, it is a good idea to export and test often. You can quickly open your font in apps like OTMaster or FontTableViewer, or on test pages like Wakamai Fondue or FontDrop, see further below for more info on those. Did an unnecessary glyph still make it through the limbus? It will not go unnoticed.

Pro tip: If you find yourself exporting very often, export as regular OTF without overlap removal and without hinting. It is much quicker. Once you have the perfect subset, you can go back to full-blown, proper production-ready WOFF exports.

Feature Subsetting

If you have done subsetting, and you export, you may end up with an error dialog like this:

The dialog reports a MakeOTF Error in the feature code. Usually a ‘syntax error’, and then it mentions a glyph name (brevecomb in this example), and the exact spot: which line in the features.fea file inside the font’s Temp folder (line 74 in this example), and which line inside which feature (line 2 in ccmp in this case). What most likely caused the error is a glyph name that still appears in your feature code but points to a glyph that is removed by the subsetting. In other words, the feature code in File > Font Info > Features is not in sync with the glyph structure in the subsetted instance.

If the feature in question is an automatic feature, this should not have happened in the first place. But it can happen if you have some complex custom parameter stuff going on. In that case, you may need to force the automatic update, simply by adding this custom parameter to your instance, and activating its checkbox, of course:

• Update Features: force-refreshes all automatic OpenType feature code (including classes and prefixes) if enabled.

If, however, you have non-automated manual feature code, you may want to consider one of these parameters:

• Remove Prefixes: takes a list of prefix names and deletes them during export.
• Remove Classes: takes a list of OT class names (without the preceding at sign), and deletes those at export.
• Remove Features: takes a list of four-letter OT feature tags, and deletes the respective features at export.
• Replace Prefixes: supply the name of a prefix as it appears in the sidebar, followed by a semicolon, followed by new code, which is inserted at export time instead of the original code.
• Replace Classes: supply the name of an OT class (without the preceding at sign), followed by a semicolon, followed by new code, which is inserted at export time instead of the original code.
• Replace Features: supply the four-letter feature tag of a Feature, followed by a semicolon, followed by new code, which is inserted at export time instead of the original code.

More Filesize Reduction

Experience shows that the most significant reductions are achieved by subsetting, but there are more ways to squeeze another kilobyte or two out of your WOFFs. To find out what causes the most weight gain in your woff, see how big the tables are in your WOFF. The best way to do this is to download and install fonttools, and list all font table by running ttx -l fontname.woff in Terminal. Or better, you type ttx -l followed by a space, and then drag the WOFF into the Terminal window, which inserts its file path, then press Return. If everything went fine, you will get a list of tables similar to this:

    tag     checksum    length    offset
    ----  ----------  --------  --------
    CFF   0x9C30A665     29398      2992
    GDEF  0x3C093D1F       189     32392
    GPOS  0x15445ACD     13356     32584
    GSUB  0x42EA82BB      1429     45940
    OS/2  0x68B4820A        78      1372
    cmap  0x8F4E4BFE      1042      1928
    head  0x12AB135E        52       292
    hhea  0x066A05BF        32      1340
    hmtx  0x1BC61668       994       344
    maxp  0x02435000         6       284
    name  0x76A3CF96       475      1452
    post  0xFFB80032        19      2972

Look at the length column: You can tell that the table with the tag CFF (Compact Font Format, with PS outlines) takes up the most space, closely followed by GPOS (glyph positioning). CFF, cmap and hmtx are directly influenced by the number of glyphs in the font, while GDEF, GPOS and GSUB get their gravy from all OT features (including kerning) in your font. CFF is also where the PostScript hinting info is stored.

Let’s take a look at a typical TT-based webfont:

    tag     checksum    length    offset
    ----  ----------  --------  --------
    DSIG  0x00000001         8     14124
    GDEF  0x01C701B8        28       384
    GSUB  0x4C1A4D0D       492       412
    OS/2  0x697CB056        76       904
    cmap  0xEFD48A4D       628       980
    cvt   0x0CE0037F        40     12208
    fpgm  0x9E3611CA      1729     12248
    gasp  0x00000010         8     12200
    glyf  0xE8E7B58E      8718      1608
    head  0x112593E0        53     10328
    hhea  0x088C054F        32     10384
    hmtx  0xDBC80FBB       336     10416
    loca  0x668F76DC       216     10752
    maxp  0x033E0F25        32     10968
    name  0x6F5D0BBB       348     11000
    post  0x55CEA4FD       852     11348
    prep  0x6846C89C       143     13980

In TrueType fonts, outline info is stored in the glyf table, typically the largest table in the font. TT hinting info is spread across prep, gasp, cvt, and fpgm.

So, depending on where you count the most bytes, you can make an informed decision on which file reduction steps you want to take next. Here are a few suggestions.

Reduce hinting:

Are you exporting TT-based webfonts and using the Autohint option? Add a TTFAutohint options parameter to your instance, and fine-tune where possible:

• Limit your hinting: ttfAutohint can be limited to a certain PPM size. Try to keep it as low as possible, only employ it for sizes where it really makes a difference. So, keep your Hinting Limit low, e.g. below 50, and employ a small Hint set range that encompasses only the most important PPM sizes, e.g. 12 to 32.
• Avoid extras such as Hint composites, Adjust subglyphs, Detailed info, and ttfa table. They are usually not needed, and can take up quite a bit of space.
• Activate No Autohint Info. It is not much, but hey.

If you are exporting CFF-based webfonts, perhaps only apply hinting to the glyphs you need most. Consider a custom parameter called Disable autohinting for glyphs and supply a list of glyph names that should be excluded from hinting.

If your font is for catering only or mainly to Apple hardware: Consider removing hinting altogether, or perhaps also supply an unhinted version that is delivered only to Apple devices. If your web admin knows how to do that, of course.

Reduce kerning:

A lot of kerning will evaporate once the involved glyphs have been removed. But the kerning that is left may still be a burden on the file size.

Get rid of smallest kern pairs. Anything up to a certain threshold value can go. Depending on the design, that can be 5 or 10 units, for instance. In the mekkablue scripts you will find a Metrics > Delete Small Kerning Pairs that will help you with this task.

Needless to say, do this only with a copy of your font.

Mark attachment:

Consider a Remove Glyphs parameter for deleting combining accents—of course only if your font uses scripts that do not depend on them, e.g., Latin, Greek or Cyrillic. The lack of combining accents will prevent Glyphs from building the mark (Mark Attachment) and mkmk (Mark-to-Mark Attachment) features and therefore reduce the size of your GPOS table. You can achieve that by removing all *comb glyphs.

Be careful though, it may backfire: TT-based files may become larger because they cannot employ the combining accents as components in your diacritics anymore. So, always test, compare and verify. If the file size grows, instead of deleting the combining accents, consider a Remove Features parameter with:

mark
mkmk

CFF-based fonts should always slim down when you get rid of combining marks, because they do not use components in the first place.

More compression:

For CFF-based WOFF and WOFF2 fonts, you can also try disabling subroutinisation. The compression used by WOFF and WOFF2 sometimes actually does work better. It is worth a try, so add the parameter Disable Subroutines to your instance, flick on its checkbox, then export and measure file size.

Testing

According to Miguel Sousa from Adobe, a font that is not tested is a broken font, and he is right. But how do you test a webfont? In browsers of course: Safari, Chrome and Firefox on the Mac, and in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox on Windows. And how do we do that, ‘test in browsers’? Well you have several options.

First of all, right after export, you can run Test > Webfont Test HTML from the mekkablue scripts. It will create an HTML file for the current file (.glyphs or .glyphsproject) inside the last folder into which you exported a webfont. And it will open that folder for you straight away. Open the HTML in a browser of your choice, activate OT features, type your test text, and see your font in several sizes. It also provides sample CSS code.

Or you can drag your finished WOFFs into Viktor and Clemens Nübel’s fantastic FontDrop, which they developed for Monotype. Drag your WOFF in, get an overview of your complete font. Good for testing font info, hinting (with waterfalls) and glyph set. Heck, it even provides spacing indicators!

Similar to this, you may want to use Roel Nieskens’ genius Wakamai Fondue test page. It is insanely great for testing OT features, and even provides sample HTML and CSS code for your copy-pasting pleasure.

From the program:

This winter we are organizing a workshop in co-production with Poligon – creative center, which is located in the heart of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

We are going to focus on design of display typefaces, which could be used on poster. As usually we start the workshop fully hands-on and kick off with drawing the type. Further on we continue building a firm concept for a type or a type family. Later, each participant will work on his/her individual typeface in a digital environment. On the Wednesday, the poster of all participants are evaluated and exhibited as large high quality prints.

Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Type Days Ljubljana 2019: intensive type design workshop

• When?

  23 March – 25 March 2019 with the exhibition on 26 March, Poligon
  Sat – Mon, we start our day with a morning coffee and croissants served at 9 am in Poligon. A lecture with demonstration at 9.30 am, lunch break at 1pm, individual work during the day and group consultations at 5 pm. Refreshment breaks anytime of the day.

• Who?

  This year our mentor is Alja Herlah. She holds MA from Graphic and Interactive Communications where she focused on designing non-Latin typefaces. After the graduation she broaden her skills as Font Developer in Atlas Font Foundry, Berlin. She is currently living in London, working as Font Developer at DaltonMaag.

• Where?
• How much?

  200€ (185€ students) includes breakfast, refreshments and all the tools needed. The price also includes annual Tipo Brda membership (professionals: 30 €, students: 15 €) for all the participants. Only bank transfers are accepted. The complete sum needs to be paid in advance by 1 Mar 2019. In case of cancellation we keep 20 % administrative costs.

• For whom?

  Students of graphic design, typography, architecture and all other people with some basic experience with type design or calligraphy. Our agenda is to connect people with different skills and backgrounds. You are welcome to bring your own ideas and sketches of type you want to work on them.

• Prerequisites

  Bring your favourite drawing tools (fineliners, markers, pencils, pens, white-out, a sketchbook, …). A laptop computer is required, we prefer the application Glyphs or FontLab. However, if you work with any other font editor this is not an obstacle. The workshop crew will provide transparent paper and other stationery.

• Links

  http://www.tipobrda.com/delavnice/type-days-ljubljana-2019/

Along basic and advanced lectures on type design you get known with basic lettering, drawing skills and developing the concept of the typeface. You will be guided step by step throughout the digital workflow: scan preparation, correct vector paths, curve optimisation, automated tasks and prototyping the font.

Whether you’re a beginner or you already have an advanced type design project, Love-letters invites you to participate to its typeface design workshop.

Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Love Letter Type Design Workshop

• When?

  10–12 April

• Who?

  Sébastien Sanfillipo

• Where?

  Brandingtoday
  Begijnenkerkhof 6A
  2800 Mechelen

• How much?

  EUR 350
  (students or recently graduated: EUR 180)

• For whom?

  Beginners

• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled.

• Links

  All info and registration

During the workshop you will analyse the principles of letter drawing based on classical and contemporary models and you will learn the fundamentals of the construction of letter-forms. Depending on the needs of your personal project, special attention will be given to digital type design specifics such as vectorization, Bezier curves, letter spacing, kerning, interpolation and workflow.

A 3-day introductory course that covers theoretical and practical aspects of designing typefaces for Indian scripts.
Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Course: Introduction to Type Design

• When?

  03 – 05 May 2019

• Who?

  Girish Dalvi (IDC IITB)
  Noopur Datye (Ek Type)
  Sarang Kulkarni (Ek Type)

• Where?

  IIT Bombay, Vanvihar Seminar Hall
  Mumbai

• How much?

  Academia: ₹ 15,000 + GST
  Industry: ₹ 20,000 + GST
  Full Time Students: ₹ 10,000 + GST
  Foreign National: ₹ 60,000 + GST

• For whom?

  Professional designers who are interested in learning about type design. Calligraphy and Lettering artists who wish to convert their designs into fonts. Faculty mem- bers from art and design schools who are interested in teaching a course on topics related to type design. Final year students from art and design schools.

• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with Glyphs 2 preinstalled.

• Links

  All info and registration
  Register before 26 April 2019.

This course consists of lectures, class assignments, discussions and case study presentations. Participants will learn about the history of Indian type design, fundamentals of Devanagari typography, multi-script type design, ideation for new typefaces, basics of type design, and font technologies. Discussions will include approaches and issues related to type design, font ownership and licensing, script grammar and aesthetic preferences, decolonising type design, and upcoming technologies. Being a hands-on course, participants will work towards developing ideas for new typefaces, and will create a font with a limited set of characters.

Glyphs team member Rainer Scheichelbauer will hold a public lecture at American University Beirut in March. See you there!

Making a Difference: Type Design and Politics

• When?

  Friday, 29 March 2019
  18.00

• Who?

  Rainer Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  Lebanese American University
  Beirut Campus
  Tabbara Street, بيروت, لبنان

• How much?
• For whom?

  Public lecture, open for everyone.

• Prerequisites
• Links

This public lecture will be about what type designers can do (and have done) in terms of political engagement.

Includes: Yes, but can OpenType and Variable Fonts do this? — A fun tour de force of what you can do with OpenType features and variable fonts.

After the lecture, there will be some time for Q&A.