In text view glyphs offers me different find and replace-commands that seems to have no effect. Or am I doing something wrong?
Only Find … does work, wich is inserting a glyph instead of finding.
When making/controlling the kerning of a font I usually copy all uppercase, lowercase oder small caps to a new tab und insert e.G. T between every glyph. It could save much time if I could replace all T with Tbar, Y or any other glyph in one go.
Should these commands not be greyed out when having no effect?
Cmd-F in Text view is for inserting glyphs. You would be better off using the sample texts, simply prepare your needed sequences of characters and paste there. You can even make a shortcut for next/previous sample text.
Also, in the kerning window, there is an option to show all permutations of a given pair. Text View is very basic, it would be cool if it would offer tracking and line height though.
Of course I know that cmd-F is for inserting glyphs. Maybe it should be renamed to insert.
The sample text-feature is no option, cause most of my fonts have different alternate glyphs. Some have a.ss01, some a.ss02, some a.alt, some a.cv01, some just a and so on with a lot of glyphs. I would have to make a string for every possible combination and later when using I would have to pass all these strings with no mathing glyph in the current font.
Yes, text view is very basic, I think search and replace is also a very basic feature.
You can copy and paste the contents into a text editor like TextWrangler and paste it back.
Also consider placeholders and stepping through glyphs (fn-left/right or page-up/down). That way you do not need to have extra sample texts for everything.
I already use TextEdit for replacing glyphs, but very often after pasting back to glyphs I get some confused text like e.g. /t.sc, /a.ss01, // or unwanted spaces between glyphs that I have to delete.
Placeholders are helpful to see kerningpairs, but not to change them, cause moving the curser to the pair changes of course the pair itself.
I still find, it should be possible to find and replace glyphs.
In the meantime, there are plenty of scripts for creating those pairs in Edit view. For group kerning, see my Sample String Maker and New Tab with all Selected Glyph Combinations, for instance.
Unless you have very specific irregular glyph names, you can (temporarily) auto generate the OT feature and activate in Text View. That way you also don‘t need to search/replace again if you want to change from t to t.sc and back to t.
While we are at it, I find it odd that in the find glyph dialog I can tab to the first found glyph, but not further. I would expect it to cycle through all matches with tab.
The arrow keys will go down and up that list after tabbing. This seems consistent with Mac GUI in that tab goes from pane to pane and arrows allow moving around a selector.
I know, I just find myself reaching for tab most of the time, probably because the left hand is hovering the area for cmd-f. Also (don‘t tell anyone) the arrow keys on new MacBook Pros are a crime against humanity.
In this case there is no other pane to switch to with tab, so it might as well cycle. Just a thought.