Workflow improvements for Correcting Anchor Points in Composite Glyphs

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Requests and Enhancements
1

Hi everyone

I have a really good one today.

image
image1915×841 45 KB

Here is a photo of a composite glyph that was created using a formula: E+gravecomb. We can see the gravecomb is out of alignment. The question is: can we have a much faster way to fix this?

Right now we don’t know if the anchor is incorrectly placed in the E, or in the gravecomb. (I know “auto-attach” is off, but pretend that auto-attach is on and that we still have the gravecomb out of alignment). We shall need to visit both glyphs to review their anchors in order to fix this.

Here are some suggestions on how to make this faster. I am not sure what would be the easiest to implement:

  1. Quick navigation to member glyphs
  2. Anchors panel include tabs to allow us to choose to view the anchor data for the Composite glyph, base glyph, and mark glyph
  3. Display of member glyph anchor points in the glyph window of the Composite Glyph
    1. In another colour
    2. Toggle on/off

I really struggle with correcting anchors on variable fonts, and anything that can be done to speed up the process is so important. 90% of the work these days seems to be anchors.

Thank you for your consideration.

2
  1. With a composite glyph open in the glyph panel, right-click and select Add Components to Text.

Haver you tried Complete Composites → Anchor Based Reposition?

3

Hi Erwin

I hope you can trust that this is a problem that cannot be solved by Anchor Base Reposition, because it’s primarily caused by the Glyph Transformer. We use the Glyph Transformer to vary the width, weight, and slant of our Simple glyphs in order to make all of our variable font variation endpoint instances. But the Glyph Transformer doesn’t move the anchors. We make our adjustments to the Simple glyph anchors, but there are always some Composite glyphs that end up way out of alignment, and it’s a battle to figure out which anchors are causing the problems.

Does that make sense?

4

I don’t understand why that fails. Can you provide a stripped down version of the font project that illustrates the issue?

1 Like