Autoalignment for metrics, not diacritics

1

I have the following situation: in an Arabic typeface I want to place my diacritics manually (or at least disable automatic alignment of diacritics when beginning to work on mark positioning). So far so good, the trouble is that I still rely on the automatic alignment to take care of the metrics of my base components in glyphs that carry diacritics. This, however, does not work for me. Even though the base component has automatic alignment enabled, whilst the diacritic doesn’t, the advance width and position of the base glyph does not get updated when the source outline Glyph’s metrics are adjusted.

The workaround I’ve been using to resolve this is 100% manual, making the whole automatic alignment laughable: I have to cut the diacritic component, resulting in the base component picking up the correct metrics, and past the diacritic back in. One by one, for every master.

Could you tell me if this is by design, a bug, or if I have missed a solution to this?

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I should add that it is double troublesome, as the warning for out-of-sync metrics for component glyphs does not work in this scenario, making fixing it an even slower process!

2

Cannot reproduce. The base component is updated for me, but of course the marks do not move when the base shifts. This works only if the first component is the base glyph.

Would it help you if you could define positions relative to an anchor? Half automatic alignment, so to speak? I could work out a plug-in solution for that. Do you have time tomorrow? I believe we are in the same town :slight_smile:

3

Since you cannot reproduce it I’ve tried to reproduce it. And could reproduce it right away, so please have a look at the attached screen recording and .glyphs file. As far as I can see this does not do what I would expect it to do, but maybe my expectation is wrong…

autoalignment_dummy.zip (1.6 MB)