Font Forum

If you define an anchor in a glyph it is not automatically added to the classes which use that anchor, it has to be manually added and only then does it affect the placement of a diacritic mark.

It would be useful to be able to get a list of anchors which have been defined in characters but not added to the relevant class in Open Type Designer. Yes I know that I can scan through the characters looking for anchors which don't have the link symbol next to them but that is very tedious to do.

Is there a quick way to get a list of unused anchors?

Right now there is no easy way.

We could add a category to the font overview to show all glyphs with unlinked anchors. We could also try to "rebuild" a glyph class to include glyphs which have a specific Anchor. But before we start implementing such enhancements, it might be better to first have some more insight in how you (and other users) add OpenType layout features.

Hmmm ... when I first started to investigate the use of anchors I took a look at other peoples fonts to see how they used them. The problem was that there were very few fonts which use anchors, it seems like only the Microsoft fonts use anchors.

It is tedious to implement at first but I think it will be worth it in the end because all the diacritic marks will be correctly placed with whatever glyph they have been anchored to.

So doing a lot of programming work to satisfy my needs might not be worth the effort because it seems like I am the only one using anchors at the moment.

When I have finished the font if anyone wants to take a look to see what I've done they are quite welcome. I have tried to make the anchor names meaningful so it will be easy to understand.

But that is a long way off at the moment.

Erwin Denissen wrote:Right now there is no easy way.

We could add a category to the font overview to show all glyphs with unlinked anchors. We could also try to "rebuild" a glyph class to include glyphs which have a specific Anchor. But before we start implementing such enhancements, it might be better to first have some more insight in how you (and other users) add OpenType layout features.

For me re-building the class list to include all glyphs which have that anchor (being careful to put the 'mark' anchors and the 'base' anchors in separate classes) would be more useful. But if this is a lot of work and if I'm the only one using it then don't feel that you have to.

Maybe another way to get around this problem would be to allow the user to filter the glyphs which appear in the add glyphs box in class manager, if they could be filtered to show glyphs which have a particular anchor that would be very useful.