I’m on Glyphs Mini 2.1.9 and wanted to make a change to a font I created a long time ago (like, years ago). I don’t understand the usage of double equals (==) for side bearings. It seems that I’ve used them everywhere in my font. Do they have any relevance in Glyphs Mini?
In particular, the LSB of my “period” character is “==. (0)” Doesn’t this mean it references itself? The “colon” also has “==.” but when I change the LSB of “period” to, say, “42” it only changes the period’s LSB, not the colon’s LSB, there it still says “==. (0)”, not “==. (42)” as I would expect. I want to change the period’s left side bearing to a different number and have all other depending characters (i.e. colon and others) be adjusted, too. How do I do that?
Or did I just do this wrong and it should have been “=.” — i.e. single equals — everywhere all along? I’m thoroughly confused.
ps. The handbook talks about masters in this context. But Glyphs Mini doesn’t support masters, am I right?
Correct: Glyphs Mini doesn’t do multiple masters, and the double equals signs are used to indicate that a constant metric key only applies to the current master, not all masters (as a single equals sign does).
Since a constant metric key with only a reference to another glyph (and no mathematical calculations) does the same as leaving out the equals sign, I would say that Glyphs Mini should treat all of n, =n and ==n the exact same.
Changing the metrics of a glyph that others refer to will not automatically update those glyphs, but they will get an indicator that their metrics are out of sync, and you can then easily sync them all in one go by selecting and hitting ⌃⌘M – at least that’s how it works in Glyphs; I don’t know about Glyphs Mini.
Thanks everyone for the feedback. The problem was using the period character instead of the “period” string. After changing the formulas to “=period”, things work as expected.