Another Quotation Mark Noob

Hey guys, fairly new to the app and getting acclimatised to the workings of things. I’m currently stuck with getting quotation marks to show in the preview text box within the app. To the best of my knowledge I have added the correct glyphs to the correct boxes and yet they won’t show up when typed. I did read a few related posts on here but couldn’t seem to get clarity on what was happening for me here.

I’m not getting any single or double quote marks but I seem fine getting other punctuation to show up such as Periods and Commas? (The single quote base is a placeholder hence the positioning being weird!)

Any help would be greatly appreciated

can you re-upload the image, it’s not showing

Think I updated it now! Just in case:

What you are typing is probably the straight (‘dumb’) quote and you probably don’t have that one in your font yet. On a Mac you can explicitly type curly quotes. Most text processing apps turn straight into curly quotes automatically. But for that to work, you need to also have straight quotes in your font. Open the Categories sidebar in Font View, then look for Punctuation and Quote. Make sure you have all the glyphs in there covered.

Hi Mekkablue,

I seem to have all the punctuation for quotes covered now but still seem unable to get any quotation marks to appear when typing the dumb quotes button in the text preview window in Glyphs. Bit of a headscratcher for me!.

I have also run into this behaviour, my solution is to write my preview text somewhere else like TextEdit and then paste it back, with the automatically converted smart quotes. Upon further thought, I felt it did make sense not to activate smart quotes in the Glyphs preview field. If you want to type a specific character (for instance, in this case, your quotes), simply hit Cmd+F while in typing mode to find your respective glyph. This may be a bit more tedious but makes more sense than smart quotes, I think. Maybe there’s some really outlandish OpenType feature that does smart quotes, who knows.

Edit: Well, that was a quick find. Check this out: cirw.in/blog/smart-quotes
If you code this into your feature set, you can activate the feature in the preview panel (bottom left) and when you type your quotes, they will automatically become “smart”.

Alright, it works perfectly. I have it once for English quotes and once for German ones (whatever the proper terms are).

English:

# english smart-quotes.
# quotes surrounded by spaces, just leave alone.
ignore sub space quotedbl' space;
# quotes after numers, assume are primes, and leave alone.
ignore sub [
  one two three four five six seven eight nine zero
] quotedbl';
# quotes after opening characters are open-quotes.
sub [space
     equal
     less
     parenleft parenleft
     bracketleft bracketleft
     braceleft braceleft
     guillemetleft guillemetleft
     guilsinglleft guilsinglleft
     quotedblleft quoteleft quotesingle quotedbl
] quotedbl' @All by quotedblleft;
# other quotes in the middle of the line are closing quotes.
sub @All quotedbl' by quotedblright;
# quotes at the start of the line are opening.
sub quotedbl' @All by quotedblleft;

German:

# german smart-quotes.
# quotes surrounded by spaces, just leave alone.
ignore sub space quotedbl' space;
# quotes after numers, assume are primes, and leave alone.
ignore sub [
  one two three four five six seven eight nine zero
] quotedbl';
# quotes after opening characters are open-quotes.
sub [space
     equal
     less
     parenleft parenleft
     bracketleft bracketleft
     braceleft braceleft
     guillemetleft guillemetleft
     guilsinglleft guilsinglleft
     quotedblleft quoteleft quotesingle quotedbl
] quotedbl' @All by quotedblbase;
# other quotes in the middle of the line are closing quotes.
sub @All quotedbl' by quotedblleft;
# quotes at the start of the line are opening.
sub quotedbl' @All by quotedblbase;

I have the first as ss10 and the second as ss11, in want of proper feature names, but it works. Is there any way of having this basically hard-coded, without having to search for ss10 and ss11?

I think what mekkablue meant is that you also need the straight quotes /quotedbl and /quotesingle,
you can add these glyphs here: Punctuation > other

Yes, in order for it to work in normal text editing environments. The initial question in this thread was specifically about getting them to show up in the glyph preview window in Glyphs.

This is a replacement of characters (rather than glyphs) and therefore should not be handled in the font’s OpenType features. This is a job for the app inside which the font is used, or more precisely, the layout engine/renderer/rasteriser.

Take this only as a proof of concept, do not use this code in a shipping font. It can mess up things.

Super useful share with the Cmd+F functionality thank you! And as for the code you’ve outlined, also very useful to have and something I’ll get my head around a little more as I’m very green on the fundamentals of the backend of a type-build!

Thank you for clarifying and yes I think I’ve gotten the quotes working using single straight (dumb) quotes now, I found a missing glyph within “other” for some reason instead of “quote” but now it seems back in the “quote” section?? Very confused but it’s working! I’ll use the CMD+F to see the curly quotes working for now thank you very much for all your help! I’m sure this isn’t the last you’ll be hearing from me on this haha

Which version of the app are you using?