Add paste feature to Glyph Transformer

Quite often I want to paste the same contour into multiple glyphs, and when (like this morning) I need to paste the same contour into several thousand glyphs it is not practical to do it manually. Is there already a way to do this? If not, please could you add a feature to the Glyph Transformer wizard to paste glyph contours from the clipboard into the glyph. It seem like this should be quite an easy feature to implement, but would save me a lot of time and effort.

Right now it is not possible, but you can add glyphs with formulas, even within the glyph transformer:

agrave=a+gravecomb
adotbelow=a+dotbelowcomb

Would that be of use?

I have a font which is called ‘Spare Parts’ which is a collection of useful bits and experiments. It started out being just a perfect circle which Erwin posted a while ago.

For what I think the original poster wanted the formula idea would be more useful if you could do something like :-

= + gravecomb

Which would add ‘gravecomb’ to all the selected glyphs. In this way a spare part could be cut and pasted into the font your’e working on then added to many glyphs.

I could not get that to work in the glyph transformer. Can you give more detailed instructions?

Yes, that is exactly what I want. At present I’m exporting my font to ttx where I can globally paste in the contours as text, and then export back to ttf, which is not ideal. But with over 6,000 glyphs to transform it would take to much time to do it manually inside FontCreator. Perhaps I could hack CompositeData.xml to do what I want, but that is not something I really want to do.

Actually the formula is meant to make composite glyphs, so it seems that is not what you are looking for.

We could add a transform feature that adds all contours from one glyph to all selected glyphs. This obviously will only work for simple glyphs.

We might come up with better solutions if you provide some illustrations or screenshots.

That would be the perfect solution for me.