When I change the glyph name to a member of a composite glyph, the change is automatically translated to the formula for the composite glyph. Is it possible to have changes in a glyph name automatically reflected in the arguments to the various glyph metric functions (e.g., lsb, rsb, aw) that can be used in the LSB, RSB, and AW input sections of the Glyph Properties panel? I have over 4200 glyphs in the font I’m working on and I don’t relish the idea of going through them one by one to make the necessary name changes in all of the metric functions that I use.
How do you use the glyph name in the metrics?
For example, I originally had a glyph named uF6000 (since that would automatically give it the correct code points via the Insert Glyphs dialog). Glyph uF6001 then must have an LSB and RSB of lsb(uF6000)+20 and rsb(uF6000)-2, respectively. However, when I got around to changing the name of the uF6000 glyph to something more descriptive, the “uF6000” within the lsb and rsb functions did not automatically change to reflect this fact. As such, I needed to manually fix this each time it occurred.
Is Glyph uF6001 a composite which uses Glyph uF6000 as a composite member?
If so and it is meant to be the base glyph, then you could just provide
LSB: base()+20
RSB: base()-2
or with Auto Attach enabled:
LSB: +=20
RSB: -=2
No, but Glyph uF6001 is something of an enlarged version of Glyph uF6000 (although not one that can simply be scaled as composite members can). Situations such as this occur frequently in fonts used for mathematical writing, where certain symbols (e.g., parenleft) need at least a dozen different sizes. Moreover, the easiest way to handle the LSB and RSB for each size is to base these values on the LSB’s and RSB’s of previous sizes.