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Class sorting in Open Type Designer
Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2019 12:11 pm
by PJMiller
It is tedious to arrange the order of classes in Open Type Designer.
It would be nice if there was a button which could sort the class into something useful. A very useful order would be each base glyph followed by the composites which use that glyph. So 'A' would be followed by 'Agrave','Aacute','Acircumflex', etc. until 'B' would be placed after the A list. Then the same for each simple glyph in order each followed by the composites which use that glyph.
This is the order which I usually arrange the anchor classes but it would be nice if there were a way to do it automatically.
Re: Class sorting in Open Type Designer
Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2019 12:19 pm
by Erwin Denissen
Do you want to sort the list of classes, or the glyphs in a class?
Sorting glyphs in a class may cause serious issues if used with substitutions.
Re: Class sorting in Open Type Designer
Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2019 12:39 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
I use cut and paste in the Code Editor to sort classes in the order that I want. It is much quicker than using the buttons to move a class up or down in the list. There is already a button (FontCreator 11.5) to sort them by name.
- Sort Classes.png (5.06 KiB) Viewed 11650 times
Re: Class sorting in Open Type Designer
Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2019 12:52 pm
by PJMiller
I want to sort the glyphs in a class. These classes are used for anchors not the ones used for other things.
This is a 'nice to have' rather than an 'essential' and it only has to be done once per class so I will continue with sorting them by hand. But I will look at the code editor to see if there is a section I can copy and paste (thanks Bhikkhu Pesala, I hadn't thought of that) to just sort it once then copy it to the italic, bold and bold-italic fonts.
Re: Class sorting in Open Type Designer
Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2019 1:35 pm
by Erwin Denissen
I've added your request to the to-do list.
Re: Class sorting in Open Type Designer
Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 5:58 pm
by PJMiller
Having sorted the glyphs with each base glyph followed by the composites that use it consistent positioning of anchors is now much easier, and I spotted some anomolies.
It is worth doing, however I realised that if I had sorted the glyphs alphabetically in the main window before making the classes in the first place (so that they were sorted alphabetically in the dialog to select glyphs for a class) then the process would have been a lot quicker and easier because most of the glyphs in the class would have been in the correct order to start with.
Silly me.