v1.13.05 – A Bucket of Features

Howdy! It’s been a couple months… I’ve been fixing up a few bugs, and adding a few new features. Neat!

As I mentioned in my last post, a few features are sneaking into V1, focusing on the fit-and-finish stage of developing a typeface. One of these features is from v1.13.01, but here is an overview of the new ‘review’ stuff:

Previous / Next buttons

The two arrows beneath the Context Glyph area let you easily fly through all your glyphs, as opposed to the two or three clicks it takes to switch glyphs via the Glyph Chooser Panel. The order of the glyphs happens to be the order in which they were created (as opposed to alphabetical)… so have fun with that 🙂

Mark Overlapping Path Points

Many times when you’re importing SVG from other programs like Adobe Illustrator, those programs made some interesting choices as to how to add path points. This feature, enabled from Project Settings > UI Behavior, draws a little red circle around path points that happen to be very close to each other. You can actually choose the radius you want to check for – this can really help quickly identify these extra path points.

Showing and rounding path points with decimal values

I’ve been getting mixed messages as to whether or not decimal values are ‘okay’ for OTF files or not. Even if they are okay, sometimes I just want certain path points to hit whole Em values – it satisfies the detail-oriented side of me.

In settings Project Settings > UI Behavior, there is now a checkbox that enables you to highlight these points:

And, once you have identified them, there is now an additional “Round all point position values” action. You can do this command on a selected Path Point, all points in a selected Shape, or for all points in an entire Glyph:

Test Drive Permutations

Having good sample text to set your typeface with is very important. In Glyphr Studio Test Drive, a few buttons help get you started – including buttons that add Latin Alphabet, and some English pangrams to Test Drive.

Two new buttons in Test Drive allow you to add all permutations of Latin upper and lowercase letters. This analytical approach is a nice compliment to seeing how your typface performs with real blocks of text.

That’s it for the new fit-and-finish features. If you have any ideas for new features like this, let me know!

Update Summary

New Features

  • New Previous / Next buttons below the Context Glyphs input box allow you to quickly flip through glyphs.
  • Mark overlapping path points – set a radius that highlights if two points are very close together.
  • SVG Import engine now supports the Glyph tag (for copy/pasting from SVG Fonts).
  • Test Drive letter permutations – automatically add all Uppercase or Lowercase letter permutations to the Test Drive preview area.
  • Test Drive preview area now dynamically expands in height to the input content.

Bug Fixes

  • Copy+Paste SVG straight to canvas bug is fixed.
  • Lots of little keyboard handlers were broken at some point, now they’re fixed.
  • Toast messages work better when rapidly changing.
  • Reverse Winding now keeps Path Point zero as the same point.
  • Whitespace glyphs besides Space export with zero shapes.
  • Notdef glyph scales to different capheights
  • Default view for Kerning is auto-calculated, as opposed to static.