How to move anchors with Glyph Transformer > Italic

[outofstepfontco]

My font uses anchors to assign accents to the composite glyphs.
When I generate an oblique version by running Glyph Transformer > Effects > Italic, the anchors don't move.

What settings should I use in order to get the anchor locations to update based on running the Glyph Transformer > Italic transformation? I can't find it in the documentation. The only option I see is "Anchor Based Reposition", which would wipe my anchor data.

Much appreciated,

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

The anchor data that you have for the Regular style is unsuitable for the Italic style, so the anchors need to be repositioned if you make an italic transformation. Anchor-based repositioning seems to be the right choice.

I suggest transforming all combining accents before transforming the composites.

[outofstepfontco]

I ended up building out a spreadsheet to calculate the displacement based on the tangent of the italic angle and the distance from the baseline to the anchor. Unfortunately that doesn't seem like something that would be as easy for many users to do.

I through it would be an easy solution since I only had 90 simple glyphs out of 800 total glyphs, but I soon found out that many of the accent attachments are set based on the anchor locations in composite combining diacriticals.

Overall, I would say the workflow needs improvement as there isn't really a way to use the Glyph Transformer to make a font oblique without having to replicate the same manual work for every font weight.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

No automated system is ever going to give perfect results for every font design. This is what I do:

1. Select all glyphs
2. Anchor-based positioning, Auto-attach
3. Select the Auto-attach category
4. Check each glyph, tagging those glyphs that need the anchor position to be adjusted. For composites that are used in other composites, open the base glyph or accents that need adjustment, and edit the anchor position, then tag that glyph
5. Select all tagged glyphs that needed adjustment of the anchor position and copy them to the clipboard
6. Open the Glyph Transformer and paste the glyphs into the Override Range by Glyph Name(s) list
7. Run the saved script in your new italic or bold version
8. Tag the selected glyphs in the new font

Auto-attach glyph transformation.png (10.74 KiB) Viewed 2908 times

You should now have a small subset of composites and accents that need some manual adjustment of the positioning. If glyph names contain hyphens (e.g. Greek or Arabic glyphs, you will need to do a find and replace in notepad to insert quotes around the glyph names). This may seem like a lot of work, but if your fonts (like mine) usually include the same glyph sets, the script can be reused many times, and quickly refined to deal with new issues that might arise. (While editing this post, I noticed several glyphs that did not need adjustment, and a few more that did).

Code: Select all

D P R U-W Y f h k y AE Oslash Ohorn ohorn Uhorn uhorn acutecomb circumflexcomb tildecomb brevecomb dotaccentcomb dieresiscomb hookcomb caroncomb acutecomb.case d.pcap r.pcap u.pcap w.pcap y.pcap ae.pcap oslash.pcap E.sups U.sups d.smcp r.smcp u.smcp w.smcp y.smcp ae.smcp oslash.smcp

Anchors to Adjust.png (49.61 KiB) Viewed 2901 times

[outofstepfontco]

Thank you for providing me with your workflow.

It's going to take a bit for me to process this as it's significantly different than what I've been doing, but I'll do my best. I appreciate your time on this matter.

It's my understanding that the anchor positions are calculated by FontCreator based on the Italic Angle. It would be a good start to have the same math included in the Glyph Transformer when applying the Oblique (Italic) transformation.