Disappearing glyphs?

Hello there.

I realized that sometimes disappearing some glyphs for no reason.
But I don’t know why it’s happening… I’m not sure what I made wrong, so I guess it’s just a bug.
When I work on some glyphs and make some copies, and name changes… I realize “it’s gone” after a while, which is surprising.

The first time I told myself, maybe I did something wrong. Maybe I deleted it accidentally.
After the second time, and third times it became suspicious that was a bug.

I will try to explain what I did last time.
So… I’ve worked on the “a”, and I tried some new versions, so I made a new layer.
After a while, I made a new version from the “a”, with cmd+c and cmd+v (there are not too many versions just an a.001) From then on I’ve worked just on this glyph.
And then I changed the name from a.001 to a.salt. I saw the glyph with the new name on my character table…
I switched the font window to continue working on it… and it happened. The new a.salt was gone from the font edit window. So… I switched again to the font window, and it was totally gone. Like if I had it deleted.
Luckily I had an early saved version, so able to recover it.
Maybe I would try to redo the process it wouldn’t anything happen.

Has anyone encountered a similar phenomenon?

Never experienced anything like that.

Which build are you using (Glyphs > About Glyphs)? Does it occur in the latest beta version as well?
Which OS?
Is the file stored locally or in sync service like Google Drive or Dropbox?
Is it still available in edit view when you Cmd-F?

What version of Glyphs do you have?

It might be that you trigger an undo and the glyph itself has no undo so the adding of the glyph is undone. That shouldn’t happen any more. To avoid this, save the file, close and re-open it after you added a glyph.

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That could be happend… maybe i’ve used the undo command.

@mekkablue I use the last 3.1.1 (3148) version, and my OSX 10.11.6.

I’ve had the same happen to me twice (with some months in between), and it just happened again this morning, that’s the reason why I am here. I’m not sure what it is that’s happening. I can be working on a glyph for a while, start typing with it, deleting the text string and then it’s just gone, as if me deleting the glyph in the text string also deletes the glyph itself. Undo doesn’t work either.

Vers: 3.1.2 (3151)
OS: Monterey 12.6

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Did you add that glyph after you opened that file?

This used to happen (probably still does) when renaming or batch renaming glyphs with cmd+shift+f into something that already has that name. There would be no error display saying that there’s a conflict between glyphs names and the glyphs with the same name would coexist until the next Glyphs session, where they’d be gone.

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Thanks for finding this. I fixed it.

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That happened! It is might be a bug… but I’m not sure, but if it happens You will be confused.

So it happens when multiple glyphs are selected in the “edit window” and then you press an “undo”. If you have just one selected… the undo works fine.
Anyway, I captured it with my screen recorder. Soo… here it is.
glyphs undo bug?
(I tried to upload, but I couldn’t.)

That is not really a but. There are just too many undo managers. Each glyph has one and the font itself has one, too. So when one glyphs is selected, the glyph undo manager is used. But with several layers selected, it uses the font undo. And that one has the addition of those glyphs as the last operation. You can see it in the undo menu item title: It says “Undo Add Glyphs”.

Is that the optimal behavior? Probably not. I’ll see if I can improve on this.

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Yes… I agree. I mean what should the app do when multiple glyphs are selected? But it’s still very confusing when it happens.
Especially when you don’t know about it.

I second this. I have encountered this multiple times that I accidentally undo the adding of glyphs. They are then simply removed from the file, with no way to bring them back.

I think a warning like “Do you really want to remove glyphs xyz?” would be very helpful.

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Hi again,

Doesn’t look like this issue have been solved as I just had this happen to me again, 5 glyphs were deleted of which 3 was thin and bold masters. It’s a bit frustrating when this happens tbh.

Ver: 3.1.2 (3151)
MacOS: 14.1 (23B74) (Sonoma)

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The fun part is that you’d expect Undo to remove added glyphs is when you are on the home page, but that’s the only place where it doesn’t do that.

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From a UX perspective it doesn’t really make sense to be able to take such a destructive action in the “Glyph edit view” that easy, or at all. That action should be limited to the overview (font panel). It’s almost as strange as letting you delete the whole Glyphs app from the overview (font panel), plus not getting asked whether you want to or not (overdramatization) :smile:

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You should get a confirmation dialog before deleting a glyph.

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Yes, absolutely, but this doesn’t happen in Glyphs, which is the reason for this post.

When a glyph is deleted through a Cmd+Z action, a confirmation dialogue should most definitely appear.

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I was thinking the same. I’ll have a look.

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