You can add your own categories or languages to the sidebar in Font View. Glyphs will look for a file called Groups.plist in ~/Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Info/. To navigate there quickly, choose Script > Open Scripts Folder (Cmd-Shift-Y), and look for a folder called Info next to Scripts. If it is not there, create it with the Finder command File > New Folder (Cmd-Shift-N).

And inside the Info folder, you create Groups.plist with a text editor, preferably one with syntax colouring for Apple Property list files (file suffix .plist). I can recommend TextWrangler, TextMate, BBEdit, or SublimeText.

and has the following format:

{
    categories = (
        {
            name = "My Category";
            icon = myTemplate;
            subGroup = (
                {
                    name = "My Group";
                    coverage = (
                        Hallo,
                    );
                }
            );
        },
    );
    languages = (
        {
            name = Esperanto;
            icon = EsperantoTemplate;
            script = esperanto;
            subGroup = (
                {
                    name = Consonants;
                    coverage = (
                        A,
                        B,
                        C,
                    );
                }
            );
        },
    );
}

When setting up your Categories and Languages, you have to stick to few rules, though:

• Put Category entries into categories=(...);.
• Put Language entries into languages=(...);.
• Each entry must have a name.
• Each item in an entry must be terminated with a semicolon.
• Each entry can either have a subGroup for nesting entries, or a comma-separated coverage list. They are mutually exclusive.
• Top level entries can also have a script attribute. They will filter for the script tag if it selected in the sidebar.
• Entries can have an icon. The name specified must end in Template. You do not need to specify the file suffix. See below for details.

Adding Icons

Glyphs will look for an image file with the specified name in a subfolder called Icons next to the Groups.plist file.

The icons can be in any image format that is supported by Mac OS. We recommend using black and white PDFs, because they scale. Make sure it is no more than 16 pixels high (16 pt at 72 dpi), and more or less as wide as it is high, so it fits nicely next to the name in the sidebar.

If you do want to use a pixel image, you will need to have two files in order to also support Retina screens: One must have 16×16 pixels, the other one 32×32 pixels. The large image needs to have a @2x extension in the file name, right before the dot suffix, e.g., esperantoTemplate.png and esperantoTemplate@2x.png. Again, the image name should end with Template. Then, the image is used as a mask to only use the alpha value. All colour information is overwritten for the purpose.

There are two ways of having accented letters in your font. Firstly, you can simply pre-build them as compound glyphs. We have covered this in a Diacritics tutorial. At CFF export, the components are decomposed, and wherever necessary, overlaps are removed. Even though this means that you have a lot of path duplicates throughout your font, this method is widely used because it is most compatible. And if you cannot predict in which environment your font is going to appear, you may have to stick to this way anyway.

Secondly, however, you can just keep marks and and base glyphs around, and have the rendering engine stick them together on the fly. This is called mark attachment. The big advantage, as you may have guessed, is a drastically reduced file size of the final font. You are even free to put any accent on any base glyph by the means of something called Mark-to-Base Attachment. What’s more, you can even stack accents on top of each other. This also has a name: font experts refer to it as Mark-to-Mark Attachment.

The downside of all this fun stuff is the lack of application support. But gradually, more and more software is supporting mark attachment. So, the best way to cope with this reality is to put both things into your font: prebuilt compounds and marks for attachment.

Adding combining accents

For mark attachment to work, we need something called combining marks, or, non-spacing marks. Mark attachment does not work with legacy spacing marks.

Typically, combining marks have a comb at the end of their name, and, apart from the scripts that have their own combining marks, usually live in these Unicode ranges:

• U+0300-036F COMBINING DIACRITICAL MARKS
• U+20D0-20FF COMBINING DIACRITICAL MARKS FOR SYMBOLS
• U+1DC0-1DFF COMBINING DIACRITICAL MARKS SUPPLEMENT
• U+FE20-FE2F COMBINING HALF MARKS

‘But which ones do I need for the languages I want to add to my font?’, I hear you ask. Fear not, in the language category in the sidebar, you can add them by right-clicking on the Language entry:

You may want to scroll down to see the combining marks. For instance, for Western Latin, these are necessary:

acutecomb
cedillacomb
circumflexcomb
dieresiscomb
dotaccentcomb
gravecomb
ringcomb
strokeshortoverlaycomb
tildecomb

Adding anchors

Basically, all we need now, is a set of defined positions where the letters and marks can connect. You do this by adding anchors to your base letters and accents. In other words, anchors serve as position markers that tell Glyphs where the letters and marks are going to be hooked up with each other. You can quickly add default anchors to selected glyphs with Glyph > Set Anchors (Cmd-U). If you think you have messed up, you can hold down the Option key and choose Glyph > Reset Anchors (Cmd-Opt-U).

Anchors inside a glyph have unique names. The base glyph has anchors called top, bottom, center and ogonek. If anchors are selected, you can see a cloud of marks that can connect with the anchors in the current glyphs:

The mark glyphs have anchors with the same names, except for additional preceding underscores, i.e., _top, _bottom, _center and _ogonek. Actually, marks contain both anchors, so the anchors can stack:

Most important for us are top and bottom anchors, as well as their underscored variants in the marks. Default anchors are a good start, and Glyphs has a big built-in database of which anchors are associated with which glyph. When you add default anchors as described above, Glyphs even tries to put them into default places. So, you may need to adjust the anchor positions in many glyphs. And if you want to add your own, you can do so by right-clicking inside a glyph and choosing Add Anchor from the context menu.

Now, here’s the deal: The underscored anchors will try to connect to the corresponding base anchor in the nearest preceding glyph. If the mark does not find a corresponding anchor in the mark immediately before itself, it will look in the mark before that, until it hits the base letter.

For example, the acute (glyph name acutecomb) knows where to go exactly on a lowercase e, by connecting its _top anchor with the base glyph’s top anchor. If there is a diaeresis (a.k.a. dieresiscomb) between them, it will use the top inside the dieresiscomb, if it is there.

So, choose your anchor positions wisely. We strongly recommend the following:

• Keep anchors on vertical metric lines wherever possible, e.g., keep bottom on the baseline, top on the x-height or ascender in lowercase letters, and on the cap height in uppercase letters.
• Since you have wisely put the _top anchor on the x-height, keep your lowercase marks above the x-height.
• Use case variants for your uppercase marks: Duplicate the marks (Cmd-D), move them above cap height, reset the anchors (Cmd-Opt-U), and change their suffix to .case. Now when you compose uppercase compounds, .case variants will be preferred if available. You can re-compose existing compounds with Glyph > Make Component Glyph (Cmd-Opt-Shift-C).

Derive spacing accents

So, starting in Glyphs version 2.0, combining marks are the default. Yet, there still need to be legacy spacing marks in your font for compatibility reasons. This is how the smart kids do it these days: You first create your combining marks with the anchors described above, then you choose Glyph > Add Glyphs... (Cmd-Shift-G), paste these lines into the dialog sheet that appears, and press Generate:

acutecomb=acute
brevecomb=breve
caroncomb=caron
cedillacomb=cedilla
circumflexcomb=circumflex
dieresiscomb=dieresis
dotaccentcomb=dotaccent
gravecomb=grave
hungarumlautcomb=hungarumlaut
macroncomb=macron
ogonekcomb=ogonek
ringcomb=ring
tildecomb=tilde
caroncomb.alt=caron.alt

This creates spacing accents as component copies of the combining accents. This means that they always stay in sync. And now you are backwards compatible, yay!

Typing combining accents

In order to test mark attachment the font, you need to be able to type the non-spacing accents in an application like InDesign. First, export your font into the Adobe Fonts folder, then create a new document, type a base glyph like a and then, add a combining accent. Here is how:

First, choose Show Character Viewer from your Input Methods menu in the toolbar (the one with the flag symbol in your menu bar). If you don’t have such a menu, activate it in System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources and turn on the option Show Input menu in menu bar:

Then, if Unicode does not show up in the left sidebar of your Character Viewer, choose Customize List... from the gear menu in the top left oft the window:

... and choose Code Tables > Unicode in the dialog sheet that appears:

Now you can select Unicode in the sidebar, scroll down to the 0300 area between Latin and Greek, pick any of the combining accents there, and insert it by double clicking:

Don’t worry. You only need to set this up once. InDesign even allows you to separately select and color your combining accents:

Again, the smart kids actually build their own keyboard layout with Ukelele from the nice people at SIL. But that is another story.

You can add your own categories or languages to the sidebar in Font View. Glyphs will look for a file called Groups.plist in ~/Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Info/. To navigate there quickly, choose Script > Open Scripts Folder (Cmd-Shift-Y), and look for a folder called Info next to Scripts. If it is not there, create it with the Finder command File > New Folder (Cmd-Shift-N).

And inside the Info folder, you create Groups.plist with a text editor, preferably one with syntax colouring for Apple Property list files (file suffix .plist). I can recommend TextWrangler, TextMate, BBEdit, or SublimeText.

Custom entries for categories and languages have the following format:

{
    categories = (
        {
            name = "Compatibility";
            icon = compatibilityTemplate;
            subGroup = (
                {
                    name = "Web";
                    coverage = (
                        .notdef,
                        hyphen,
                        space
                    );
                }
            );
            subGroup = (
                {
                    name = "Windows";
                    coverage = (
                        nbspace,
                        softhyphen
                    );
                }
            );
        },
    );
    languages = (
        {
            name = "Esperanto";
            icon = EsperantoTemplate;
            script = esperanto;
            subGroup = (
                {
                    name = "Letters";
                    coverage = (
                        Ccircumflex,
                        ccircumflex,
                        Gcircumflex,
                        gcircumflex,
                        Hcircumflex,
                        hcircumflex,
                        Jcircumflex,
                        jcircumflex,
                        Scircumflex,
                        scircumflex,
                        Ubreve,
                        ubreve
                    );
                }
            );
            subGroup = (
                {
                    name = "Marks";
                    coverage = (
                        circumflexcomb,
                        brevecomb
                    );
                }
            );
        },
    );
}

Copy and paste this sample Groups.plist content into your preferred text editor, adjust it to your liking, and save it as explained above. Then restart Glyphs, and the sidebar should look approximately like this:

Things to Consider

When setting up your Categories and Languages, you have to stick to a few rules:

• Put Category entries into categories=(...);.
• Put Language entries into languages=(...);.
• Each entry must have a name. You can leave out the straight quotes if the specified name has no spaces in it.
• Each item in an entry must be terminated with a semicolon.
• Each entry can either have a subGroup for nesting entries, or a comma-separated coverage list. They are mutually exclusive.
• Top level entries can also have a script attribute. They will filter for the script tag if it is selected in the sidebar.
• Entries can have an icon. The name specified must end in Template. You do not need to specify the file suffix. See below for details.

Adding Icons

Glyphs will look for an image file with the specified name in a subfolder called Icons next to the Groups.plist file.

The icons can be in any image format that is supported by Mac OS. We recommend using black and white PDFs, because they scale. Make sure it is no more than 16 pixels high (16 pt at 72 dpi), and more or less as wide as it is high, so it fits nicely next to the name in the sidebar.

If you desperately want to use a pixel image, you will need to have two files in order to also support Retina screens: One must have 16×16 pixels, the other one 32×32 pixels. The large image needs to have a @2x extension in the file name, right before the dot suffix, e.g., esperantoTemplate.png and esperantoTemplate@2x.png. Again, the image name should end with Template. Then, the image is used as a mask to only use the alpha value. All color information is overwritten for the purpose.

We are happy to announce the first major update to Glyphs 2!

We like to call it the You wanted it, you got it update. That is because, apart from the usual fixes and performance enhancements, the 2.1 update contains a load of improvements requested by you, the users.

Let me show you some of them.

Bounding Box Scaling

You wanted it, you got it. Turn on View > Show Bounding Box (Cmd-Opt-Shift-B), select something in Edit View, and Glyphs will display a bounding box for your selection with little white control handles. Drag the handles to quickly scale the selection into a new size. Hold down Shift for proportional scaling. Bounding box scaling works with complete and partial contours, with components, and with placed images.

Click-Align Nodes

You wanted it, you got it. The buttons in the Transformations palette now align individual nodes if no path is selected completely. So, in the rare cases where Paths > Align Selection (Cmd-Shift-A) picks the wrong axis, you can take control with the Transformations buttons.

Preview Panel

You wanted it, you got it. A separate Preview window, which you can drag to a second display. Access it through Window > Preview Panel, pick an instance in the bottom left, and you are ready to go:

It works very much like the Preview area of the Edit View. The title bar and the controls fade out once you move your mouse away, so you can concentrate on the content.

Speaking of Preview, the Preview display now uses the custom parameters winAscent and winDescent for vertical placement. So if you are unhappy about how that descender is clipped in the Preview, you can take the matter in your own hands with these parameters in File > Font Info > Masters (Cmd-I).

Good News for the Font View Sidebar

You wanted it, you got it. When working in the Font tab, you can now add your own entries to the Categories and Languages in the sidebar. This requires fiddling in a text editor, so we wrote a detailed tutorial about custom sidebar entries for you. Speaking of which, we added a new Miscellaneous folder containing Music and Braille to the Languages section of the sidebar.

And by the way, you can also organize your list filters and smart filters in folders now. To do that, simply pick Add Folders from the gear menu in the lower left corner of Font View:

New Guideline Tricks

We added locking of guidelines with 2.0. In 2.1, you now can lock multiple selected guidelines via their context menu. While we’re at it: Select any two nodes, then bring up the context menu and pick Add Guideline. The guide will be placed in such a way that it goes through the selected nodes, with the precise angle necessary to achieve this. Very useful for replicating the slant of a path segment:

Master Compatibility Just Got Easier

Glyphs has a great compatibility preview via View > Show Master Compatibility (Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-N). But if you have many paths or components, as it can easily happen in Indic scripts, all those lines and colors can get pretty confusing. And let’s admit it: If the automatic reordering through Paths > Correct Path Direction for All Layers (Cmd-Opt-Shift-R) did not work, getting all objects into the right order by cutting and pasting was frustrating at times. Well, no more! Because Glyphs 2.1 ships with a new standard plugin, Filter > Fix Compatibility.

Every column represents a master, every line an object, be it a path or a component. Paths are shown in dark blue, components are displayed in a rust color. Bracket Layers get their own column. Now, all you have to do, is drag all objects into the correct line, and press the Fix button. It’s that easy.

Better Kerning

The grey Info Box (cmd-Shift-I) now also displays the kerning group setting of the previous glyph. No more arrowing back and forth just to check on that group kerning lock!

When it comes to kerning, some major improvements have happened under the hood. We improved the way the kern feature code is derived from your kern pairs. If you do not know what this means, you never had the pleasure of dealing with a subtable overflow, lucky you.

But if you are not that lucky, you will be pleased to hear that Glyphs now has the most efficient mechanism in the industry for building the kern feature. This means that Glyphs can handle many more kerning exceptions than before, that the interpolation of kerning will work much better, and that the resulting GPOS table is smaller. Which is good news for webfonts.

Image Transformations

Ever placed a scan in a glyph, just to notice that it didn’t lay completely straight in the scanner? Well now, you can rotate it into the position you need. Once you select an image, you will see a new field in the grey Info Box (Cmd-Shift-I).

And by the way, you can also use the new bounding box or the Transformations palette for adjusting a placed image.

Working with Components

There are new and improved warning badges for missing components and bad component references. A bad reference is a component that refers to itself as base glyph:

In further news, the Glyph > Add Component dialog now remembers the most recent search string. And the display of a component selections is improved a bit. Selected components now appear slightly darker than they used to, making it easier to spot them, especially when you have a light selection color.

New Features for the Annotation Tool

The Annotation tool (A) has been improved in two ways. Firstly, you can now select all annotations in the active glyph through Edit > Select All (Cmd-A). So now, it is a snap to quickly delete all annotations: Press Cmd-A, and hit Backspace, done.

Secondly, you can now move selected annotations with the cursor keys. Hold down the Shift key for increments of 10 units, or the Cmd key for increments of 100 units.

New Features for Features

In Edit View, when a feature is selected, the feature selector pop-up is highlighted in blue. This way it is much easier to see if features are selected or not.

And there are new custom parameters for instances. Their main purpose is to facilitate subsetting for fonts that have manual feature code. This will make webfont production so much more fun:

• Remove Classes: Deletes the selected OpenType classes for this instance.
• Replace Class: Replaces the content of a class. Its value starts with the OpenType class name, followed by a semicolon, followed by the whitespace-separated listing of glyph names, e.g.:
  AllGlyphs; a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
• Replace Feature: Replaces the content of an OpenType feature. Its value starts with the four-letter feature tag, followed by a semicolon, followed by the new feature code, e.g.:
  calt; sub f' [b f h i j k kcommaaccent l lacute lcommaaccent lslash thorn] by f.short;

Language Support

Thanks to your input, we were able to improve the built-in glyph database. For instance, we could add a range of new default compositions for Arabic compounds, and improve many others. Also, a handful of glyph names were changed for better compatibility with the FDK feature code. We also added basic support for Gurmukhi, and improved the automatic generation of OpenType classes for Devanagari. Oh, and Hebrew mark positioning now works again as expected.

Glyphs 2.1 has better support for CJK. Firstly, Japanese character mapping improved a lot. And secondly, glyphs are now also exported, even if they are not present in the ROS.

There are even a few improvements to the Latin glyph data. We added new default anchors and default marks to Latin base glyphs. And the default composition of oslash was improved: It now takes slashlongcomb as the diagonal bar, connected through the center and _center anchors.

Likewise, use slashlongcomb.case for the uppercase Oslash. For Lslash and lslash, however, we still use slashshortcomb (and its .case variant). The reasoning behind this is that long overlays cross two stems, while short overlays cross only one stem.

The same principle applies to overlaying strokes: strokeshortcomb for the lowercase dbar, hbar, and uppercase Eth, and strokelongcomb for the uppercase Hbar. If you have used any of these overlaying marks before, you will notice that we have removed the overlay from the nice names. Makes it easier to type them.

Better TrueType Hinting

Firstly, the TrueType Instruction tool (I) performs much better than it used to. Not only is it faster, it creates proper diagonal hints, too. That should take care of any problems you may have had with diagonals.

We also improved the prep table generation, so that we can better suppress overshoots at small pixel sizes. Still, we managed to minimize path distortions by using the Freedom Vector, in case that tells you something.

And, most significantly, we now display the instructed TrueType outline, as calculated by DirectWrite. So now, you can immediately see what your instructions do with your contours in Windows:

If you do not like manual TrueType hinting, and prefer to automate it, you will like that we updated the built-in TTF Autohint to the very latest version.

Python Goodness

We are very happy to announce that Yanone has joined the Glyphs team. He has already been hard at work on the Python wrapper, as well as the Python documentation. As a result of his work, the Python interface of Glyphs now offers many more convenience methods. That means that coders will not need to resort to the PyObjC bridge anymore. Or at least, much less.

Yanone has also added many code samples to the online Python documentation. We are convinced that this will make coding much easier for budding scripters.

UFO Improvements

We improved the way Glyphs handles Unified Font Objects. Better import and export, improved stability. In particular, we significantly improved conversion of lib data between the .glyphs and .ufo formats. Lib data conversion is now round-trip compatible. If you go back and forth a lot between RoboFont and Glyphs, you will be pleased to hear that we synced handling of extra UFO layers, especially background layers, with how RoboFont does it.

Smart Components

I saved some of the best goodies for last: Smart Components can do a few more nice tricks!

For one thing, it is now possible to extrapolate Smart Components. While the sliders in the Smart Component settings only go as far as the Property Limits take them, you can set the number value to something a value outside the interpolation range. Up and down arrows work as expected, also in combination with the Shift key, which gives you increments of 10.

Here is one for the geeks amongst you: Smart Glyphs can now use all layers from all masters. That means that now you can add Weight and Width properties to your Smart Glyphs, and interpolate simply with different Smart Component settings in the Light, Bold, Condensed, and Extended masters. Cool!

Also, we significantly improved the handling of nested Smart Components. And if you set the values for Smart Components via Python, the display update now is much snappier.

Many more small details

Many bugs have been squished, and the overall stability has improved significantly. But there are many little improvements you will notice in your workflow. To name just a few:

Pay attention, for example, to how the Reconnect Nodes function does a better job now: It creates fewer nodes in overlaps, and manages to create a proper single corner if it reconnects two straight segments. It can even build a clean segment without superfluous nodes if the two segments are collinear, i.e., completely aligned with each other.

Or look how the Preview area now respects Bracket Layers. And how Bracket and Brace Layers show a proper mark cloud when an anchor is selected.

Spanish-speaking users will appreciate an updated and improved translation, which was provided by Txus Marcano.

Single-master files display no Masters button in the toolbar anymore. That means less confusion for first-time users.

One final word of caution: Should you use version control with your .glyphs files, do not be alarmed by a whole bunch of changes that the new version causes. In the file, we store negative numbers without quotes now. That will make parsing significantly easier for third parties. But, yeah, you will gulp once when you see the first change log after the update.

SAMPLE FONTS: SUBMARINER BY MARIN ŠANTIĆ, GRAUBLAU SLAB BY GEORG SEIFERT

We are happy to announce our sponsorship of this year’s edition of the Granshan conference, hosted next week at Reading University. We will be present and available for questions throughout the conference. On Friday, after lunch, Glyphs team member Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer will give a brief presentation about how to implement uncharted territory in Glyphs:

Unfinished: How to work on a script for which there is no implementation yet

• When: Friday 24 July, at 2pm (after lunch)
• Language: English
• Who: Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (@mekkablue)
• More details

Designing a typeface for a script that has not been digitised yet? Seriously? Okay, this lecture will point you to resources for your technical research. The presenter will show you how to prepare Glyphs.app for a new script, and, most importantly, what to tell the Glyphs team members so that they can implement it in the software. The presentation will finish with a few implementation examples, to show what the Glyphs people can do for you and the script language you want to implement.

The Unified Font Object is an XML-based file format for storing font data. It was developed by type designers and developers Tal Leming, Just van Rossum, and Erik van Blokland. While the specs for version 3 have been released, UFO 2 is currently in most widespread use.

While you can produce a font or font family in Glyphs alone, the UFO format makes the exchange with other tools possible. UFO gives you access to a variety of other tools. This is why Glyphs supports it out of the box. But why would you want to do that in the first place? Easy: Typically, UFO tools are highly specialized apps, entirely dedicated to a specific task. That means that those tools can pick up where the in-app functionality of Glyphs leaves off. Read on for a few examples.

UFO does not store everything

One thing to keep in mind is that many Glyphs-specific settings, like enabled or disabled automatic alignment of components, or things like the bracket trick, cannot be stored in UFO files. So take extra care and double-check your files where necessary.

Very important: UFOs are single masters. Multiple Master information cannot be stored within a single UFO file. This means that if you want to interpolate, you will need to use one UFO file per master.

Preferences and file settings

If you want to be prepared for tapping into a UFO workflow, you will find two important options in Glyphs > Preferences > User Settings. What they have in common is that they are applied to all non-native files opened in Glyphs, e.g. a file with a .ufo suffix.

Firstly, enabling the option Keep glyph names from imported files will prevent Glyphs from converting the names of the glyphs to its own naming scheme. In a pure Glyphs workflow, there are certain advantages if you stick to the internal naming scheme. But when you are moving a lot between applications, you will usually want to keep the names as set in the file.

Secondly, you may want to keep the placement of components in your file. In other words, you may want to keep Glyphs from enforcing automatic alignment of composite letters. In that case, selecting the option Disable automatic alignment in imported files is a good idea.

What these two settings do, is set the two corresponding options in File > Font Info > Other Settings, namely Use custom naming (or Don’t use nice names in older versions of Glyphs) and Disable automatic alignment. There, of course, you can also set these options manually.

Of course, if you go the opposite direction, i.e., take your .glyphs file for a UFO ride, you can keep the settings at their defaults, and take full advantage of automatic alignment and nice names.

Now that we are prepared, we can get down and dirty with UFO files!

Exporting UFOs

If you want to create a UFO copy of your current font project, pick File > Export > UFO. In the upcoming dialog, you can choose which masters you want to export, and in the following dialog, where you want to save the UFO files.

The option Convert Glyph Names to Production Names will convert the human-readable nice names, such as Zhe-cy, for Cyrillic uppercase Zhe, to their industry-standard counterparts, like uni0416. While these names may be hard to memorize, they are more compatible. Some tools may expect them to be in place. Our advise: Testrun your workflow with nice names, and if it does not work, you can still choose to convert the names.

Important: Please make sure you update to version 1.4.4, which fixes a bug in the UFO export of multiple masters.

UFO as saving format

If you already have a UFO file lying around, you can open it in Glyphs, and stay in UFO mode. Saving (Cmd-S) will save directly to the UFO.

You can also use File > Save As… (Cmd-Shift-S) to save a copy of your frontmost file as a UFO. In order to achieve that, you need to pick Unified Font Object as File Format in the export dialog. Glyphs will warn you if saving as UFO is not possible, e.g., when the file in question has more than one master. In that case, you would need to use File > Export (Cmd-E).

Once you have your UFO files ready, you are ready to work with a multitude of specialized applications and tools.

RoboFont

Belgian type designer Frederik Berlaen’s UFO editor RoboFont was built from the ground up for ultimate workflow flexibility. To achieve that, he made it very simple to build your own tools with the easy-to-learn programming language Python. No wonder that, for RoboFont, a wide variety of plugins and scripts are available on GitHub and other places across the web. Many extensions are listed on the RoboFont website itself. To get an idea of the power of the underlying API, take a look at Loïc Sander’s ‘An experiment in parametric type design’ video.

MetricsMachine

Tal Leming’s MetricsMachine is an app completely dedicated to kerning. With specialized tools for kerning group and kerning pair creation, stack views, automatically adapting contextual strings, a range of presets, etc., the app offers a more systematic and analytical approach to kerning than Glyphs can.

The app sports a Pair List Builder for creating all possible kerning pairs out of selected glyphs. Once you have your pairs set up, step through your kerning list with up and down arrows, adjust the kerning in steps of 10 units with left and right arrows, hold down the Shift key for steps of 5 units, the Option key for single-unit steps. Finally, the Spreadsheet function helps you get a grip on your kern table: filter and analyze to your heart’s content.

One little catch: What Glyphs calls a right group (based on the side of the glyph that is involved), MetricsMachine calls a left group (based on the side of the kern pair).

By the way, you can also incorporate MetricsMachine in a pure Glyphs workflow. All you need to do is export your UFOs, and kern them in MetricsMachine. Now, you can bring all the kerning info back into your Glyphs file by selecting all glyphs and choosing File > Import > Metrics… And in the upcoming dialog, pick whether you want to just import the kerning, or also the kerning groups.

Important: all glyphs that are supposed to be affected, need to be selected before you import. So, probably the best idea is to simply select all glyphs, and then import.

Superpolator

While you can do Multiple Masters in Glyphs alone, Erik van Blokland’s Superpolator opens up a whole new universe of inter- and extrapolation. Since the app is entirely dedicated to interpolation, you get things like immediate preview and live measuring options, any number of masters on any number of axes, individual interpolations for any number of glyphs, you name it. For a brief introduction, watch Erik’s Superpolator 3 presentation at Robothon 2012.

More UFO tools

Actually, these are just three examples for UFO-based applications. Keep your eyes open and you will find many tools, like RoboFont author Frederik Berlaen’s roundingUFO, which has proved very handy for creating ink traps. And if you want to go ahead and plunge into the Superpolator universe, Tal Leming’s Prepolator helps you prepare UFO files for interpolation.

Interestingly, also many command line tools work with UFO files. For instance, take a look at ufo2otf, which allows you to compile a ready-to-use webfonts and OTFs directly from a UFO. Speaking of OpenType, Adobe’s own Font Development Kit for OpenType can make use of UFO files. Tal Leming’s ufo2fdk can prove helpful if you make use of it.

Don’t use UFO for FontLab

If you want to move your font project between Glyphs and FontLab Studio, however, it is a bad idea to use UFO as exchange format, because too many things may get lost on the way. In this case, it is better to use the Glyphs Import and Glyphs Export macros for FontLab Studio, provided by Georg on his GitHub repository.

In early February, team member Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer will give two introductory workshops for the Typographische Gesellschaft in Munich: one about Glyphs 2, and one about Python. Both workshops require no prior knowledge and will be held in German.

Schriftgestaltung mit Glyphs 2: Eigene Schriften am Computer entwerfen

• Who: Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer
• When: Sat 7 Feb 2015, 10.00 – 17.00
• Where: Designschule München, Eingang West (Wallstraße), Raum 405/406, Sendlinger-Tor-Platz 14, München
• Language: German
• How much: EUR 180 (150 for members)
• Bring your MacBook (OS X 10.9+) with Glyphs preinstalled
• More info on the tgm website

Für Einsteiger wie erfahrene Schriftgestalter: Einführung in die Schriftgestaltungs-Software »Glyphs«. Im Workshop beginnen die Teilnehmer einfach, eine Schrift zu entwerfen, und lernen dabei alle für die Schriftproduktion wichtigen Funktionen kennen.

Python mit Glyphs: Programme schreiben in der Schriftgestaltung

• Who: Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer
• When: Sun 8 Feb 2015, 9.30 – 16.30
• Where: Designschule München, Eingang West (Wallstraße), Raum 405/406, Sendlinger-Tor-Platz 14, München
• Language: German
• How much: EUR 180 (150 for members)
• Bring your MacBook (OS X 10.9+) with Glyphs and a text editor preinstalled, no prior programming knowledge required
• More info on the tgm website

Der Workshop bietet eine Einführung in die Programmiersprache Python. Wer ihn absolviert, wird in der Lage sein, Python zur Automatisierung in Glyphs einzusetzen. Ziel ist es nicht, Python auswendig zu beherrschen, sondern zu wissen, wo man bei Bedarf nachschlagen muss – und dadurch in der Lage zu sein, selbstständig Python-Scripts zu schreiben.

This intensive two-day introduction will provide you with all the tools to get your first type design project off the ground. Discounts for Colab, Syndicom, and Syna members, free for Viscom employees!

Einführung in die Schriftgestaltung mit Glyphs

• Who: Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer
• When: Fri-Sat 13-14 Feb 2015, 9.15 – 16.45
• Where: Colab Zürich
• Language: German
• Bring your MacBook (OS X 10.7+) with Glyphs preinstalled
• Details, pricing and registration

Sowohl für Neueinsteiger als auch für Umsteiger von anderen Programmen: Wir beginnen eine Schrift in Glyphs und decken dabei alle notwendigen Produktionsschritte ab, um einen guten OpenType-Font zu erstellen. Ausführliche Handouts erlauben eigenständiges Weiterarbeiten.

Introdução ao desenho de letras com o Glyphs 2

• Who?

  Diego Maldonado

• Where?

  to be announced

• How much?

  BRL 300

• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook (OS X 10.9+) with Glyphs 2 preinstalled

• Links

  More Details
  Registration

At the end of February, Brazilian type designer and lettering artist Diego Maldonado will host a type design work shop in São Paulo. This eight-hour introduction will provide you with everything to get you started with type design in Glyphs 2. If you’re in São Paulo, don’t miss it!

Workshop de 8 horas para quem deseja começar a utilizar o Glyphs como editor de fontes, seja para a vetorização de letterings ou para desenvolvimento de tipografia. O workshop engloba desde boas práticas para trabalhar com vetores até multiple masters e interpolação.

In March, Brazilian type designer Eduilson Coan will host a 2-day type design work shop in Paraná. On day 2, he will demonstrate digitization with Glyphs 2.

Curso introdutório de desenho de tipos

• Who: Eduilson Coan
• When: Sat 7 Mar and Sun 8 Mar 2015, 8.30 – 18.00
• Where: Nex Coworking, Rua Francisco Rocha, 198, Batel, Curitiba, Paraná
• Price: BRL 350 for a single day or BRL 540 for both days if you register before mid-February, see the workshop page for pricing details
• Language: Portuguese
• Bring your MacBook (OS X 10.9+) with Glyphs 2 preinstalled
• More Details and Registration

Modulo 1: Indicado para o participante que deseja um primeiro contato com o design de tipos. O objetivo do módulo 2 é a qualidade do desenho vetorial. Para poupar tempo com questões técnicas o participante receberá uma apostila digital uma semana antes da data do workshop. O aluno deverá realizar os exercícios para aprender mais sobre o software Glyphs que será utilizado no dia do curso. Dúvidas pontuais poderão ser tiradas em sala de aula.

There are two ways of having accented letters in your font. Firstly, you can simply pre-build them as compound glyphs. We have covered this in a Diacritics tutorial. At CFF export, the components are decomposed, and wherever necessary, overlaps are removed. Even though this means that you have a lot of path duplicates throughout your font, this method is widely used because it is most compatible. And if you cannot predict in which environment your font is going to appear, you may have to stick to this way anyway.

Secondly, however, you can just keep marks and and base glyphs around, and have the rendering engine stick them together on the fly. This is called mark attachment. The big advantage, as you may have guessed, is a drastically reduced file size of the final font. You are even free to put any accent on any base glyph by the means of something called Mark-to-Base Attachment. What’s more, you can even stack accents on top of each other. This also has a name: font experts refer to it as Mark-to-Mark Attachment.

The downside of all this fun stuff is the lack of application support. But gradually, more and more software is supporting mark attachment. So, the best way to cope with this reality is to put both things into your font: prebuilt compounds and marks for attachment.

Adding combining accents

For mark attachment to work, we need something called combining marks, or, non-spacing marks. Mark attachment does not work with legacy spacing marks.

Typically, combining marks have a comb at the end of their name, and, apart from the scripts that have their own combining marks, usually live in these Unicode ranges:

• U+0300-036F COMBINING DIACRITICAL MARKS
• U+20D0-20FF COMBINING DIACRITICAL MARKS FOR SYMBOLS
• U+1DC0-1DFF COMBINING DIACRITICAL MARKS SUPPLEMENT
• U+FE20-FE2F COMBINING HALF MARKS

‘But which ones do I need for the languages I want to add to my font?’, I hear you ask. Fear not, in the language category in the sidebar, you can add them by right-clicking on the Language entry:

You may want to scroll down to see the combining marks. For instance, for Western Latin, these are necessary:

acutecomb
cedillacomb
circumflexcomb
dieresiscomb
dotaccentcomb
gravecomb
ringcomb
strokeshortoverlaycomb
tildecomb

Adding anchors

Basically, all we need now, is a set of defined positions where the letters and marks can connect. You do this by adding anchors to your base letters and accents. In other words, anchors serve as position markers that tell Glyphs where the letters and marks are going to be hooked up with each other. You can quickly add default anchors to selected glyphs with Glyph > Set Anchors (Cmd-U). If you think you have messed up, you can hold down the Option key and choose Glyph > Reset Anchors (Cmd-Opt-U).

Anchors inside a glyph have unique names. The base glyph has anchors called top, bottom, center and ogonek. If anchors are selected, you can see a cloud of marks that can connect with the anchors in the current glyphs:

The mark glyphs have anchors with the same names, except for additional preceding underscores, i.e., _top, _bottom, _center and _ogonek. Actually, marks contain both anchors, so the anchors can stack:

Most important for us are top and bottom anchors, as well as their underscored variants in the marks. Default anchors are a good start, and Glyphs has a big built-in database of which anchors are associated with which glyph. When you add default anchors as described above, Glyphs even tries to put them into default places. So, you may need to adjust the anchor positions in many glyphs. And if you want to add your own, you can do so by right-clicking inside a glyph and choosing Add Anchor from the context menu.

Now, here’s the deal: The underscored anchors will try to connect to the corresponding base anchor in the nearest preceding glyph. If the mark does not find a corresponding anchor in the mark immediately before itself, it will look in the mark before that, until it hits the base letter.

For example, the acute (glyph name acutecomb) knows where to go exactly on a lowercase e, by connecting its _top anchor with the base glyph’s top anchor. If there is a diaeresis (a.k.a. dieresiscomb) between them, it will use the top inside the dieresiscomb, if it is there.

So, choose your anchor positions wisely. We strongly recommend the following:

• Keep anchors on vertical metric lines wherever possible, e.g., keep bottom on the baseline, top on the x-height or ascender in lowercase letters, and on the cap height in uppercase letters.
• Since you have wisely put the _top anchor on the x-height, keep your lowercase marks above the x-height.
• Use case variants for your uppercase marks: Duplicate the marks (Cmd-D), move them above cap height, reset the anchors (Cmd-Opt-U), and change their suffix to .case. Now when you compose uppercase compounds, .case variants will be preferred if available. You can re-compose existing compounds with Glyph > Make Component Glyph (Cmd-Opt-Shift-C).

Derive spacing accents

So, starting in Glyphs version 2.0, combining marks are the default. Yet, there still need to be legacy spacing marks in your font for compatibility reasons.
After you’re finished with your combining marks, just add the legacy marks, which will be generated automatically. Why is that possible? Because legacy accents are composed of combining accents:

Typing combining accents

In order to test mark attachment the font, you need to be able to type the non-spacing accents in an application like InDesign. First, export your font into the Adobe Fonts folder, then create a new document, type a base glyph like a and then, add a combining accent. Here is how:

First, choose Show Character Viewer from your Input Methods menu in the toolbar (the one with the flag symbol in your menu bar). If you don’t have such a menu, activate it in System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources and turn on the option Show Input menu in menu bar:

Then, if Unicode does not show up in the left sidebar of your Character Viewer, choose Customize List... from the gear menu in the top left oft the window:

... and choose Code Tables > Unicode in the dialog sheet that appears:

Now you can select Unicode in the sidebar, scroll down to the 0300 area between Latin and Greek, pick any of the combining accents there, and insert it by double clicking:

Don’t worry. You only need to set this up once. InDesign even allows you to separately select and color your combining accents:

Again, the smart kids actually build their own keyboard layout with Ukelele from the nice people at SIL. But that is another story.

Zero width anyone?

Combining nonspacing marks should have zero width. Also, they should be shifted left (i.e., have a negative lieft sidebearing) so they can sit above an average letter. That is meant as a fallback for when the mark feature doesn’t work.

But: In the .glyphs file, you do not need to set the width of combining accents to zero. You can let the app take care of that: At export, Glyphs will automatically retract the LSB to the RSB. Makes editing easier, and you only need to take care of the RSB. Hurrah!

The Edit View is where you can type text, in order to edit and test your font. To access Edit View, you can either double click a glyph in Font View, or open a tab with View > Open Tab (Cmd-T). The selected glyphs are then opened in the Edit View, and the Text tool (T) is active.

You can now type any text you want, and edit any of the typed glyphs. That is one of the key features of the software: to edit in a word context. Because when making a font, we do not just want to make a group of beautiful letters, but rather a beautiful group of letters, to paraphrase Matthew Carter:

Switch to glyph editing

In order to actually edit the outlines of a glyph, you can double click it, and the glyph is ready for your vector edits. You can achieve the same thing by clicking on an edit or select tool in the toolbar.

You cannot type the tool shortcut (e.g., S for the Scale Tool), because that would type the letter rather than switch to the tool. If, however, you do not want to lift your hands from the keyboard, simply press the Esc key, and the current glyph (the one to the right of the cursor) becomes editable.

Pro tip: If you type a letter twice, and double click one of them, you get an immediate high-res preview in real time, right next to your vectors.

Switching through glyphs

In text mode, you can quickly go from one glyph to the following by first moving the cursor in front of it, and then pressing the Home and End keys on your keyboard. On a MacBook keyboard, you can press Fn and the left and right arrow keys to advance or go back through your glyph set:

Pro tip: If you hold down the Shift key, the advancement stays within the glyph set currently displayed in the Font tab. So if you just want to switch through your basic ASCII letters, select Languages > Latin > Basic in your Font tab, then go back to your Edit tab, and hold down your Shift key while switching through the glyphs.

Sample strings

And of course, you can define your own set of sample texts in Glyphs > Preferences > Sample Strings. They are great for spacing and kerning. You can step through these strings if you choose Edit > Select Sample Text (Cmd-Opt-F):

Some people prefer to step to the next sample text with Edit > Other > Select Next Sample String and Select Previous Sample String. Want a shortcut for that? You can define one in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts:

SAMPLE FONT: PRAKASHAN ITALIC, COURTESY OF ALESSIA MAZZARELLA.

Imagine you want to re-use the shoulder of your lowercase n, for example, in your lowercase m or h. Sure, you could do that with components like we did with slab serifs. There is one problem with using regular components, though: they are static.

But we need to adjust the shoulders in the m. Most people like to have them a little narrower. That is because the two shoulders would add up too much whitespace in a single letter.

Also, on the lowercase h, most designers will drag down the crotch to make the white incision appear as deep as in the n. That is because the stem of the h cannot be adjusted as easily as the upper serif of the n.

That is why normal, static components are of no use for us here. We need a better solution.

Setting up a Smart Glyph

We will turn the shoulder into a Smart Component. Double click the shoulder of the n to select it. Then right-click to bring up the context menu, and pick Component from selection:

When you are prompted for a Name of the Component Glyph, you enter a name that starts with _part, because it is a part we can reuse in other glyphs. Also, Glyphs created with an underscore at the beginning will be set to non-exporting by default, which makes sense for us. Assuming that you will have more than one Smart Component in your font, you should finish it with a dot suffix. In our case, I suggest .shoulder:

A separate glyph called _part.shoulder will be created. Let’s add anchors so the art can connect to other parts. First, we can add an anchor for the following part to connect. We can call it connect and align it to the right edge of the stem.

Then, we need an anchor, so _part.shoulder can connect to a preceding part. Assuming that the preceding one has a connect anchor in it, the corresponding anchor must be called _connect with an underscore at the beginning. Since they should all have the same height (i.e., y coordinate), I suggest keeping the anchors on the baseline. Once we are done, it could look like this:

Because it starts with _part, it is recognized as a Smart Glyph. But as long as it does not have any extra layers, it is not very smart yet. So, let us copy the current layer twice, and name the layers NarrowShoulder and LowCrotch. You can do that in the Layers section of the Panel sidebar (Cmd-Opt-P):

Now, you can activate the NarrowShoulder layer, and nudge it a little tighter: Select the right half of the shoulder, hold down the Ctrl and Option keys, and press the left arrow key. The selected part will move to the left, and the surrounding handles will be adjusted proportionally. Add Shift for increments of 10 units:

Do the same on the LowCrotch layer, but this time, you select the two leftmost nodes and nudge them down to achieve a lower crotch. The simple nudging should do as a start. You can refine the shape later.

Now, with _part.shoulder still active, right-click in the canvas to bring up the context menu, and choose Show Smart Glyph Settings. Or, with the same effect, choose Edit > Info for Selection (Cmd-Opt-I):

In the dialog sheet that appears, you add a property called shoulderWidth with the Plus button, and enter 0 and 100 as its Limits. The name and the numbers are more or less arbitrary, the Bottom limit is required to be smaller than the Top limit, though. And the values should make sense to you. I choose zero to represent the minimum width of the shoulder, and a hundred for its maximum.

Then, add a second property called crotchDepth with -100 and 0 as its limits. To me, -100 best represents the lowest crotch, and zero the normal crotch.

Then, switch to the Layers tab of the dialog sheet. Here, you tell Glyphs which property values apply to which of the layers. In our case, this could be:

• Regular: crotchDepth 0 and shoulderWidth 100
• NarrowShoulder: crotchDepth 0 and shoulderWidth 0
• LowCrotch: crotchDepth -100 and shoulderWidth 100

Once you set all properties for all layers, you can confirm the dialog by clicking on the OK button.

Adjusting the Smart Component

Now, back in glyphs like h, m, and n, you can delete the vector shoulders, and insert _part.shoulder as a component with Glyph > Add Component (Cmd-Shift-C).

Now, if you right-click on the component, and choose Show Smart Component Settings from its context menu, or, alternatively, select the component and choose Edit > Info for Selection (Cmd-Opt-I), you will be presented with a slider dialog. Use the sliders to interpolate the Smart Component in place:

In order to make use of the anchors, it makes sense to also turn the stem into a smart glyph with a connect anchor. And perhaps add an extra layer for different bends on the top serif, so you can achieve various degrees of incisions. In any event, this is what _part.stem could look like:

Automatic alignment with anchors only works if all parts of the glyph are components. As soon as there is a regular path in the glyph, automatic alignment is cancelled, and anchors are ignored.

Now, for instance in the lowercase m, place _part.stem as the first component, and subsequently _part.shoulder twice. You will see that they connect nicely at the anchors. And again, you can adjust the parameters for the Smart Components:

SAMPLE FONT: VESPER, COURTESY OF ROB KELLER AND KIMYA GANDHI

Smart Components as CJK radicals

The original intention of Smart Components was a better way for designing CJK glyphs. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean, some characters get reused in other, more complex ideographs. These characters are therefore called radicals, because they form the root (latin ‘radix’) for other characters.

For that reason, not only glyphs that start with _part count as Smart Glyphs, but also all CJK radicals. Naturally, that is also where Smart Component setups tend to become more complex:

Beginning of May, Glyphs team member Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer will give a one-day rundown on what’s new in the latest version of the app at the Dalton Maag office in London. This is a hands-on presentation and workshop for type designers.

What’s New in Glyphs 2.0

• Who: Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer
• When: 7 May, 11.00 am thru 7.00 pm (with coffee and lunch breaks)
• Where: Dalton Maag, 8th Floor, Blue Star House, 234-240 Stockwell Road, London SW9 9SP
• Price: GBP 70
• Language: English
• Prerequisites: prior experience in Glyphs 1.x or any other type design software
• If you want to try out stuff live, bring your MacBook with OS X 10.9.5 or later. Glyphs 2.0 runs great on OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
• Limited seating: 10 places
• Interested? Please send an e-mail to Rainer Erich directly: res (at) glyphsapp (dot) com.

Topics covered will include:

Controlling paths: curvature (fit curve, harmonizing curve segments), overlaps.
Re-using shapes: components, smart components, smart corners & caps.
Diacritics: combining marks and dynamic mark attachment.
Controlling metrics: automatic alignment, linked sidebearings, kerning.
Batch processing: filters, custom parameters.
OpenType features: automated and customized feature code.
Interpolation: multiple master, brackets, braces.
Screen optimization: PS & TT hinting, automatic and manual.
Font formats: exporting CFF/OTF, TTF, webfonts.
Color fonts: working on multiple layers.
Extend the app: scripts and plugins.

This 4-day pro workshop is probably the first of its kind in Israel. It is tailored to professionals and serves as an introduction to version 2.0 of Glyphs.

Intensive Glyphs 2.0 Pro Workshop

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  Shenkar College, Anne Frank St 12, Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv

• How much?

  1770 Shekel (incl.VAT)

• For whom?

  professional type designers with prior experience in type design software, such as FontLab Studio, Fontographer, FontForge or Glyphs 1.x

• Prerequisites
• Links

  All infos & registration: http://www.avanteam.co.il/glyphs-workshop

The tutor will take you through a sample project covering all steps necessary for producing an OpenType font family in Glyphs 2.0, from drawing paths to font hinting. The following topics will be covered:

• Controlling Paths: Curvature (Fit Curve, Harmonizing Curve Segments), Overlaps
• Re-using Shapes: Components, Smart Components, Smart Corners & Caps
• Diacritics: Dynamic Mark Attachment
• Controlling Metrics: Automatic Alignment, Linked Sidebearings, Kerning
• Batch Processing: Filters, Custom Parameters
• Opentype Features: Automated and Customized Feature Code
• Glyph Positioning: Positional Forms, Cursive Attachment
• Interpolation: Multiple Masters, Brackets, Braces
• Screen Optimization: PS & TT Hinting, Automatic and Manual
• Font Formats: Exporting CFF/OTF, TTF, Webfonts
• Color Fonts: Working on Multiple Layers
• Importing Fonts and Paths from Other Applications
• Extend the App: Scripts and Plugins

We are honoured to announce that Glyphs team member Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer will present at Lletraferits 2015 in La Pobla de Cérvoles, Spain. This time, it is about Glyphs 2.0. Rainer Erich will be present throughout the conference and is available to help you with all questions about the new version of Glyphs.

«Todo lo que quiera saber de Glyphs 2.0»

• When: Friday 24 April, after lunch
• Language: English with live Spanish translation
• Who: Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (@mekkablue)
• Prerequisites: MacBook Pro with OS X 10.9.5 or later; or nothing if you are just watching.

Lletraferits is by invitation only, but, hint hint, try to get in touch with one of the organisers and ask if there is still a place available.

The renown Viennese type designers Michael Hochleitner and Thomas Gabriel from the Typejockeys will give a three-day intensive introductory workshop in Natters, not far from Innsbruck. If you can make it, it is definitely worth spending the weekend in Tyrol!

Schriftlabor mit den Typejockeys

• Who?

  Michael Hochleitner und Thomas Gabriel, Typejockeys

• Where?

  Seminarzentrum Ferienparadies Natterer See, Tyrol, Austria

• How much?

  EUR 360 (members EUR 290)

• For whom?
• Prerequisites
• Links

Fonts selber gestalten ist im digitalen Zeitalter relativ einfach geworden. Dabei schadet es nicht, sich mit einigen Grundkenntnissen dieser trotz allem komplexen Materie vertraut zu machen. Und mit der dazugehörigen Software – in diesem Fall dem Font-Programm »Glyphs« des Berliner Schriftgestalters Georg Seifert.

For Mid-June, Domen Fras (of Tipo Brda fame) is organising a workshop with Glyphs team member Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer in the beautiful Slovenian capital. If you are close by, don’t miss it.

Glyphs 2.0 Pro Workshop

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  Univerza v Ljubljani, Naravoslovnotehniška fakulteta, Ljubljana

• How much?

  EUR 100 (students: EUR 50)

• For whom?
• Prerequisites

  Bring your MacBook with OS X 10.9.5 or later

• Links

Thursday: What’s New in Glyphs 2.0

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

Controlling paths: curvature (fit curve, harmonizing curve segments), overlaps.
Reusing shapes: components, smart components, corner & cap components.
Diacritics: combining marks and dynamic mark attachment.
Controlling metrics: automatic alignment, linked sidebearings, kerning.
Interpolation: multiple master, brackets, braces.
Screen optimization: PS & TT hinting, automatic and manual.
Font formats: exporting CFF/OTF, TTF, webfonts.
Color fonts: working on multiple layers.

Friday: Code in Glyphs 2.0

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

Batch processing: filters, custom parameters.
OpenType features: automated and customized feature code.
Extend the app: scripts and plugins.
Scripting: writing a simple Python script.

Saturday morning: Q&A

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

Individual feedback: Bring your projects for discussion.
This part is optional. Sign up during the workshop.

We are happy to announce our sponsorship of this year’s edition of the Granshan conference, hosted next week at Reading University. We will be present and available for questions throughout the conference. On Friday, after lunch, Glyphs team member Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer will give a brief presentation about how to implement uncharted territory in Glyphs:

Unfinished: How to work on a script for which there is no implementation yet

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (@mekkablue)

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

  More details

Designing a typeface for a script that has not been digitised yet? Seriously? Okay, this lecture will point you to resources for your technical research. The presenter will show you how to prepare Glyphs.app for a new script, and, most importantly, what to tell the Glyphs team members so that they can implement it in the software. The presentation will finish with a few implementation examples, to show what the Glyphs people can do for you and the script language you want to implement.

Big thanks to Janine Fuchs and the Syndicom crew for making our second Syndicom/Helias workshop in Zürich a reality! Here are all the details:

Einführung in die Schriftgestaltung mit Glyphs

• When?

  Fr 11. und Sa 12. September 2015, jeweils 09.15 bis 16.45 Uhr

• Who?

  Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

• Where?

  Impact Hub Zürich, Workshop-Raum «Garage», direkt neben Restaurant Rosso, Geroldstrasse 31, 8005 Zürich

• How much?

  CHF 1170 (discounts for members of syndicom, Syna, and Colab Zürich)

• For whom?

  Beginners and switchers

• Prerequisites

  MacBook with OS X 10.9.5 or higher, latest version of Glyphs 2

• Links

  Kursdetails auf helias.ch

Sowohl für Neueinsteiger als auch für Umsteiger von anderen Programmen. Wir beginnen eine Schrift in Glyphs und decken dabei alle notwendigen Produktionsschritte ab, um einen guten OpenType-Font zu erstellen:

• Skizze: zeichnen und digitalisieren
• Vektoren: optimale Pfadführung und Tricks
• Sprachen abdecken: Unicode, Akzente, Komponenten
• Bildschirmoptimierung: Hinting
• OpenType-Features erstellen
• OTF exportieren und testen
• Handouts für eigenständiges Weiterarbeiten