Hi. I’ve been using Glyphs to play around with accent characters. For awhile (perhaps an older version), adding anchors to accents and characters worked great. (Probably 10 months ago). Lately though, it seems like my anchors are ignored.
I did a simple test with a trival font containing two characters and an accent. When I export the font as TTF and then import the TTF font into Glyphs all the anchors disappear.
Am I doing something wrong? Is there some setting I need to specify when exporting the font to add the anchors to the TTF file? Or is there a bug in Glyphs? It would seem that the anchors are disappearing, because they are not respected in documents which use the font.
Thanks for any assistance.
Jason Glasgow
It is more likely that the import is broken. Opening a .ttf file in Glyphs is not a good way to debug. Test if the font works in Indesign or a web browser.
If you really like to see what is in a font, use a tool like our TableViewer or OTMaster.
Thanks. I just used the python fonttools package (and the TableViewer), and I was able to verify that indeed the anchors are exported.
They don’t appear in an ankr table, but I guess that is because the use the standard GPOS table.
https://developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueType-Reference-Manual/RM06/Chap6ankr.html
I do see some BaseAnchor and MarkAnchor’s in the TTF (ttx) file, but it seems like the names of the anchors (top, _top, bottom, _bottom) get lost. Perhaps that’s why it is impossible to test by re-importing the TTF file.
Despite this verification, I the anchors are not working properly when I look at my font with diacritical marks in Pages. Any other suggestions?
Anchors in GPOS don’t have names. That is one reason why it is difficult to import them from binary fonts.
And there is some support for AAT in Glyphs but by default only OpenType is exported.