Building Shcha-cy from components

Glyphs
1

I am trying to build Shcha-cy from components: Sha-cy and descender-cy. The position is defined by anchors, which works well.

However, the RSB is wrong when set to auto. If I want to set the RSB to descender-cy or Tse-cy then Glyphs tells me to disable automatic alignment. But this means that the two components get disconnected and changes I make to the Sha-cy nd its anchor will not be reflected.

Is there a way to
(1) use components, connecting/positioning them via anchors
while
(2) setting the RSB from the second, not the first component (or any free value)
?

2

Related questtion: If I want to build from Tse-cy from a comtour and the descender-cy component, can I do so using anchors? Glyphs does not seem to respect them. Why not?

3

Oh, wait, how did I just do that? Copy & pasted the two components from one layer to the other and now I do have alignment via anchors along with RSB via formula. Is it a cool hack or will there be potential problems (funny things happenig on export etc.)?

4

You can disable alignment on the first component only. Or you can add __descender-cy (with two underscores), and its width will be added to the overall width of the compound glyph.

5

Excellent, thanks! I was not aware that automatic alignment can be set for each component individually.

Using __descender-cy could be a nice trick if executed carefully but I guess using a sidebearing formular is more robust.

How about mixing contours and components? Like building Tse-cy from a contour and the descender-cy component. Can they be linked via anchors?

6

I think the added space is in most cases the better option. Because the absolute sidebearing is quite different in the Kdescender and the strait ones. You just need a little bit more to give the descender a little room.