Feature suggestion: Guideline Label

This would be very handy!

I know it was suggested here and shot down but when doing scripts other than Latin, it can get messy > just look at Claus Eggers Sørensen glyphs file!

Guideline labels would complicate further. Imagine what the screenshot would look like. Here, like in many other cases I have seen, guidelines are used as vertical metrics. Guidelines however, by their very nature, are a quick and temporary means for orientation, because they are quick to set up, alter, and delete again. Which is not what you need for a vertical metric.

So, what is needed is not more complicated guidelines, but a better vertical metrics implementation. Trust me, we are working on a better solution.

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I see — but as a temporary solution while we don’t have decent vertical metrics implementation (which provide easy identification):
I was thinking guideline labels would be such that you can toggle them on and off separate to toggling lines themselves (which I imagine users often do anyway) — a feature which Robofont has I believe. This would prevent the viewport from being cluttered.

Nonetheless, you guys are doing a great job with Glyphs and I look forward to seeing your solution!

@mekkablue:
So, what is needed is not more complicated guidelines, but a better vertical metrics implementation. Trust me, we are working on a better solution.

I’m bringing this up again as I’m finding my files getting confusing with guidelines. Having labels for the guidelines that can be toggled on and off (on it’s own and not part of toggling Metrics - Shift+CMD+M) would be very useful.

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I have a preliminary plugin for custom zones that seems to work for some and not for others, please contact me by email.

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I had also proposed guideline labels. It would be especially useful for global guidelines. Reading what @mekkablue says, you shouldn’t be obliged to add a label to a guideline so no worry for the mess.
Something like this could be useful and discreet enough.

You could also add a contextual option to show/hide labels (if set)

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The real problem, as far as I can see, is that you need additional alignment zones in some letters, not necessarily guidelines.

The guideline hack leads to situations where there are literally dozens of guidelines visible at any given time. I find it at least questionable if that saves any time, let alone with context menu options to toggle label display.

I have been working on a plugin for custom zones, where you can specify a glyph name search term, and the zones are displayed only in matching glyphs, in a custom color. I ran into a beta testing problem which I have not been able to reproduce on my machine yet. So I couldn’t release it yet.

I’m not sure it’s only about alignment zones. For instance I can have more vertical positions inside an unique alignment zone, or I draw an icon font, or I can wish to align without necessarily think about low resolution rasterizing.

Guides already can display a label. There is only no UI to set it. But you can do so by this small scrips:

# Select one guide

# Glyphs 2.3
Layer.selection[0].name = "Hallo"

# or Glyphs 2.2
Font.selectedLayers[0].selection[0].name = "Hallo"

Your rendering is a bit nicer as mine. But what happens for rotated guides? Does the text rotate, too?

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I don’t agree with jan’s illustration, the guideline should not be interrupted.
Thanks Georg, that’s cool! It should eventually be toggleable I think.

If the label is always outside the bounds of the glyph or at least on the edge of the screen, the gap is not a problem.

Glyphs don’t remember the last state of guide’s names when I close and open the file again.
Thanks, ET

Fixed it.

Thanks Georg.
An small suggestion:
Could be possible that the custom name have another color that measurement numbers?. Perhaps the same color of guide.

Hi Georg,

Glyphs doesn’t save the guideline names. Can you have a look at that?

I did say that I fixed this yesterday.

I’m sorry I didn’t receive any alert about this post replies.
The new guidelines naming works well for me! Not sure about rotating text as on non-retina screens some angles would be hardly readable I guess.
Ideally I’d make them more discreet (too much colour now) and/or make them disappear under 400pt zoom.

An idea: what if these labels were “annotations” you can link to a guideline (=moving with the guideline)? This way the guidelines UI wouldn’t be complexified and you could show/hide guidelines names (in fact you don’t need to see it all the time).

I think I have a working solution already.

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I’ve added a small UI for this, with the little knowledge I have on Python:

https://github.com/filipenegrao/glyphsapp-scripts/blob/master/addLabel2guidelines.py