It’s already possible, in a roundabout way, to use another master as the source for a component via GSComponent.componentMasterId, but it’s still quite buggy, the Hand tool shows a “bad reference” placeholder, and so does the preview bar. It’s also not possible to add a component that references the glyph itself but you have to create it in another glyph and then copy-paste it over.
Is better support for this planned for Glyphs 4? It’s a really nice feature, and I’m sure many users would love to be able to use it without extra code or workarounds.
A related request would be to make the compatibility check a bit more flexible, by testing whether the layers are compatible after decomposition.
For example, if I use components in the Light and Regular masters but outlines in the Bold, and everything is still compatible once the glyph is decomposed, then I’d rather not see the incompatibility indicator.
Glyphs could handle this the same way it handles components with inconsistent transformations, and decompose them automatically at export. Currently the workaround is to add a PreFilter with Decompose;include;...
it is planed and should be improved already (but probably needs more care).
that comes up now and then. The problem is, that this would slow down the compatibly check quite a bit. Because it would need to look into all kinds of components.
those are handled on export so this is a one time thing, not run all the time while editing.
This works if the glyphs have no anchorsn with anchors, the export raises a compatibility error.
Here is a test file, H export without problem, but H_notOk don’t. Test.glyphs (3.1 KB)
This could be an advanced setting. Only a few users likely need that degree of compatibility checking, so the current behaviour should stay the default.
Related to this, I asked about it a few years ago, but would it be possible to add an option to ignore empty layers in the compatibility check? In multi-script projects where some scripts don’t have italics, this would make the compatibility indicator much more useful.
