Cyrillic diacritics/marks

How do I do to add marks for cyrillic glyphs? Can’t see them at the sidebar…

I’m not sure if I understand you correctly, but it works just like for Latin characters. For instance, if you add a /Gje-cy to your typeface, Glyphs will automatically compose it from /Ge-cy and /acutecomb.case (or /acutecomb, if you don’t have a dedicated uppercase version of the acute). You can also do that manually by adding the /Ge-cy and the /acutecomb.case as components (cmd-shift-C).

At the left sidebar you have Mark / Combining and there are latin diacritics, so what about Cyrillic ones?

They use pretty much the same ones. Diacritics are much the same in all languages although some languages do have slight variations in shape or position.

More information about diacritics can be found here:
http://diacritics.typo.cz/index.php?id=1

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For a contrasted face, you should definitely generate a dedicated breve for use with Cyrillic, though, since the Cyrillic breve has vertical stress whereas the Latin one is horizontally stressed. The sidebar should pre-generate a cyrillic breve, though. You might also want to make an uppercase version.

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So, for example Ҙ is just a cedilla?

Yes.

To make a descender for Cyrillic (e.g. in щ) is it possible/optimal to use anchors and automatic alignment? If so, what is the proper name for the combining descender glyph? If not, should these letters be made with double-underscore components? And in that case should I forget anchors and just “place” the descender with sidebearing adjustments?

This was briefly discussed here: How to build Tse-cy and Dzhe-cy properly?

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Thanks for the link.
I think I have it going now. One issue I didn’t realize is that the names of anchors is less free than I thought. I had invented my own names like “tail-cy” and “[underscore]tail-cy”, but it appears Glyphs is much happier with “bottomright” and “[underscore]bottomright”.

Hm, I don’t think the cedilla shape fits well, it’s better to use a tail shape similar to other Cyrillic letters with a tail.

All fonts on my system except the fonts from Paratype use the cedilla. But in his case the minority seem to be right. Thanks for the tip.

Most fonts on my system have a proper tail. :wink:
Once I investigatively drove through Luçon in France to find out that those locals are very happy with a simple and straight tail-like shape. The cedilla-shape that looks like a ‘5’ is way too complex for Grotesque fonts, and often too light; it needs 4 pixels below the baseline before it renders properly.
As the cedilla originates from a Fraktur ‘z’, it can be a very shallow and open curve.