Add anchors afterwards

I have made a font with three masters, but without anchors in components. Is there an easy way to fix this and add anchors afterwards? How would you recommend doing this?

I would like to change metrics for the whole font with the Transformations panel. If I add for example +5 to side bearings, the glyphs with components and outlines are messed up and need to be fixed after the transformation. I understood that if I’d used the anchors, there wouldn’t be need to adjust afterwards by hand.

Just select all glyphs in font view and press cmd+U. Then switch to the second master and press cmd+U again. This adds anchors at default positions. You need to go through all of your glyphs to properly place them but that should only take a few minutes.

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This adds anchors to the base glyphs, but glyphs with (already positioned) components remain as they are? I don’t understand.

Do you mean I should trash all the existing component placements and start from scratch?

you don’t need to crash the components. What might be the problem is that you use the spacing accents as in your components and they don’t get anchors by default any more. The easiest to resolve this is to select all accents (acute, grave …) bing up the ‘Find and Replace’ dialog by pressing cmd+shift+F. Leave the search field empty and put ‘comb’ in Replace. If you have .case variants you need to rename them in a separate step: Search for ‘.case’ and replace by ‘comb.case’. Then run cmd+U on them again.

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Hmm, now /acute.case is /acute.casecomb.case

I’m guessing you didn’t mean that to happen? Btw, I used F&R with the same logic to “.narrow” and “.case.narrow” variants I have.

Anyway, all components are in the same places they were before. Looks like I don’t have to position them at all? Or am I missing something?

What about the spacing accents then? They are obviously replaced by these new glyphs, but should I re-generate them and include them into the font?

No, that should have been acutecomb.case

yes, regenerate them with this formula: acutecomb=acute gravecomb=grave in the ‘Generate Glyphs’ dialog.

Oh, I forgot the search field there, sorry. I got the names right now and the anchors are in place.

Thanks for the help!