I am new to glyphs and I am trying to export a family and the weights don’t show up properly in the font menu. It shows up as Extra Light, Thin, Light, Regular. etc. The thin should be first.
I am designing two masters (thin and black) and using superpolator to interpolate. I have a lot of experience with naming in FontLab so I get the general idea of it all but I can’t figure this out.
I am guessing there is a thread on getting your fonts to display correctly but I can’t find it. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
I forgot to mention. When I am in Font info>Instances. I will name my Style Name to Extra Light and then the weight name Extra Light. Then I will save and open it up and the weight will change to “Thin.” Similar thing happens in the Masters window when I change them all to “Regular” and then it will change the weight name to “Thin.”
I sent it to a couple of friends and they had the same issue. I am working with UFO’s on a Mac (current version) and latest build of Glyphs (no add-ons). The names stick on many different files I have. I had a friend change the names in RoboFont and then send them over. The Weight gets ‘stuck’ on the Masters page and the style name and weight also have issues on the Instances page. Tested the same on three different computers so something is up, even with a Robofont fix then reimport. I have cleared things like my features, etc and nothing seems to work. I am a trouble shooter and I am giving up. I will have to export in a different app it seems.
But 250 is the number shared between three of the (more or less arbitrary) names in the weight pop-up: Thin, ExtraLight, UltraLight. For historical reasons, these names can be taken as synonyms. In other words, what counts is only the number. If you want more differentiation, you can override it with the weightClass parameter, and set it to 260, 270, etc.
I understand what you are saying but I don’t know how to change that value. Is it in the Masters window under the Weight? I can do that or is that info is somewhere else (instances>interpolation weight?)
trueistrue…regardless of what weight you set in Glyphs, if it is lighter than Light, Glyphs sets the weight to 250. Microsoft’s apps don’t recognize anything less than 250. Some other (but not all) apps have the same limit. I’m not sure if that limit is also in the otf specs or not.
Most apps build their font menus alphabetically, so in those apps Light appears before Thin. As mekkablue said, Adobe builds its font menus based on the numeric weight. If all of your lighter than Light weights use 250 as the numeric weight, Adobe apps sort all of the 250 weights alphabetically.
In the Font Info > Instances screen, most of the bottom half of the window is taken up by the Custom Parameters area. You should familiarize yourself with those Custom Parameters…there are a lot of useful settings there.
There’s also an area to enter Custom Parameters on the Font Info > Font screen. Familiarize yourself with that area as well. There are useful custom settings there as well, such as the trademark info, description, etc.
And just a short note about the weightClass parameter…you can set increments of 10, but no apps that I’m aware of will recognize anything less than 10…so if you have several styles of the same weight, setting a weights like 250, 251, 252, etc. is useless. You have to use 250, 260, 270, etc.
Thanks tons, and this helps. My main issue is that I can’t put in information without it ‘sticking’ to the parameter that it was selected to. So even if I try to change the weight to 250 let’s say, it won’t change (yes I am hitting return). So yeah any experience with UFOs and Glyphs not cooperating would help the most at this point.
If I save it to a glyphs format then I can change the values, but not in the UFO format. I will just have to change to glyphs to complete the font…
There are some infos (e.g. relating to interpolation) that are not stored in .ufos. Others can’t be properly stored because of architecturally differences. And some are just a bug.
Can you send me a .glyphs file, a .ufo and a screenshot of how you like it to be (to support [at] this domain)? Then I might be able to fix the problem.
So what I did (incase anyone has a similar problem in the future). I changed to glyphs format to get around the names and data fields ‘sticking.’ This corrupted one of my weights by adding about 50 duplicate characters. I deleted those.
In Masters, set weight and width (only one width in the font so far) to Regular on every font. For Instances… I changed my thin to extra light and moved up some of my weights to different names to avoid the 250 thing. It wasn’t working even when I custom set the custom weightclass.
I am going to mess with it more when I have time to see if I can get it to work other ways. I am sure I can. Thanks.
I have read the MM pt 3 thing like three times now. Got it. I like to understand what things do and why. I could name with Fontlab pretty well because I spent time figuring everything out, so when problems happened, I could troubleshoot fast and could name families in 30 min or less. I have a lot to figure out still with Glyphs (which I really like).
I moved my family names around so there was only one Extra Light and no Thin weight. I am going to experiment more with the weightclass when I have time.
I am testing in Adobe and I got them all to work through changing back to Glyphs format. I sent Georg my files so he can see the error with the UFO’s.
Thanks mekkablue, georg and sandy. My main frustration started by not being able to change the values… I felt like I was doing extra things wrong, ha!
Selecting the texts from the popup actually doesn’t mean anything for the first few entries as they are all connected to the same numerical weight class value. The problem is that some rasterizers on windows will automatically draw the bolder for weight class values of 200 and below. There was a developer that thought you couldn’t read text set from very thin fonts and tried to ‘help’ the users by drawing it heavier. Thats why you can’t use those values.
i just learned about the weightclasses,
leaving them on default i have some issues on windows myself
a font as light regular and bold instances exported with default weightclass numbers
is displayed in the list as thin light and regular.
what is the actually mapping here for windows? as it seems its not matching the defaults
(windows 10)