Can't I just sort glyphs by index or Unicode as private/opaque symbols?

Update: (now that I solved this problem, I can’t delete the thread :slight_smile: )

So after a bunch of experimenting, I finally can list the glyphs in the order I want. My script copies from the orig font to new font, and assigns name, unicode, sortName, category, subcategory, etc… and assigns UNICODE values from E000+… (private PUA). I guess a lot of pollution was in the source font I didn’t realize was there, and Glyphs3 seems to have limited ability to edit properties in the GUI, but can via python.

No matter what I do in my script that attempts to build a new font from the old , by assigning new UNICODE values as ordinal values parallel to the index value, to order the glyphs in the target font as I see fit, they get rearranged in the font tab (e.g. summary display of the glyphs); the Glyphs app re-categorizes them by criteria that is “invasive” (e.g. more pertinent to a font/public UNICODE set paradigm)… Thus I can’t just treat them all as private glyphs not to be used as a standard font, or cluster them in the font tab appropriate to my app (the consumer) and use-case. It seems like it would be easy to add an option or two in the preferences to let the user have more flexibility about how the glyphs are displayed in the font tab.

Further categorizes most as ‘private’ (which is great because I’ve assigned high UNICODE values), but also quasi arbitrarily relocates some under ‘symbol’, for no clear reason (hopefully not glyph name), and ‘other’ for some, pulling them out of my carefully ordered viewing arrangement. That really messes things up. Is it possible for me to write a script to create something like the font tab my own way, where if I double-click a glyph, I’ll be editing it, like the current font tab works?

I just want to have a little control over the ordering of the glyphs that are viewed and cluster them according to private criteria that is just ‘glyph generic’, and utterly orthogonal to the font/UNICODE paradigms, not to be interpreted as a font/typeset, and be able to sort by let’s say UNICODE, index, etc… The more flexibility about how I can view the glyphs and attributes the better.

I see the API is very powerful, but not sure I could create a windows and display glyph summary info in icons and make them clickable to go to the edit page and thought I’d ask if that’s possible before trying to master the whole API to do it.

You should be able to edit most data from the inspector in the bottom left corner of Font Info:

For more fields, use EditInfo for Selection… (⌥⌘I):

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