'auto' sidebearings?

Glyphs
#1

Is there any information on how the ‘auto’ sidebearings are supposed to work? How can I use or set them?

I just tried entering ‘auto’ as sidebearings of my softhyphen (which contains one component, the hyphen) and it was rejected. I tried dis- and re-enabling automatic alignment but it did not do the trick.

#2

As far as I know: when all components of one glyph have “Automatic Aligment” enabled, the sidebearings will be “auto” automatically.

#3

Doesn’t work for the softhyphen. Bug?

#4

The auto spacing works only for letters.

#5

Is it possible to access the information auto (as written in LSB / RSB / Width of a Layer) via python?

Or is it basically the same as asking for all components to be set to automatic-alignment?

I’d like to extract this certain information as simply as possible.

#6

There are layer.leftMetricsKeyIsInSync(), layer.widthMetricsKeyIsInSync() and layer.rightMetricsKeyIsInSync() they return

  • Out Of Sync = 0
  • In Sync = 1
  • Invalid = 2
#7

Ah thank you. Kind of what I am after. But it returns 1 as well for glyphs that have no metrics key (e.g. A which has just numbers in the LSB, RSB and width)

#8

Technically they are not out of sync, so that is correct. You also need to check for the existence of a metric key on glyph or layer level.

#9

Ah, sure. Oh, but I see, my case: Aacute has no metrics key, but written auto(12) in the LMK.
glyph.leftMetricsKey returns None, and layer.leftMetricsKeyIsInSync() returns 1 as well.

Unfortunately the same results come with the A, which has plain values. So I still cannot get the difference (A <—> Aacute, while latter is auto())

#10

There is another property layer.hasAlignedWidth().

#11

That’s it. Thanks!

Edit: Just curious: why is this property not findable in help() or dir() of layer?

#12

It is not? It is:

#13

Not in the macro Window.

#14

Huh?

Remember that all the names are case-sensitive. To be on the safe side, make the if statement something like if searchstring.lower() in functionname.lower(): .

#15

I was going the super old-shool-way print dir(Glyphs.font.selectedLayers[0]) and then searching the output. This way one cannot find it. But shouldn’t it be possible as well? Cuz basically I call it on an objective-c class NSKVONotifying_GSLayer.

I was not aware, that dir(GSLayer) is possible on its own. Now I am :slight_smile: