Fontlab "Red Arrows" for Extremes?

Glyphs
1

Hi, anyone who has used Fontlab will remember the FontAudit “red arrows”.
Somewhat useful and annoying in equal measure.

I did find them useful for rooting out any extremes on my curves, I wonder if there’s anything similar in Glyphs?

Or perhaps there could be a plugin or script?

I don’t necessarily need ‘red arrows’ but it would be great to have some kind of warning that could be turned on or off, where naturally, fixing the curves would be at the designers discretion. I think if extreme points were important to your design, it would help catch bad curves that have slipped through the net.

2

Currently there’s no way to display the lack of extremes. But did you know you can apply Layer > Add Extremes to multiple glyphs at once. Before you export, you can select all glyphs and rund that command. And you can switch to the Draw tool § and Shift-click on a segment to insert an extremum on that segment only.

3

I found the FontAudit indicators for not-quite-perfectly horizontal/vertical to be useful. Anything akin to those possible?

4

You can always use the measurement tool. It will tell you the differences between two nodes (with the red numbers)
For perfectly vertical paths segments, it should read “0, XXX”, If if says “1, XXX” one of the nodes is off.
I know that is not as recognizable as FontAudit but I find it quite useful.

5

The AFDKO command “checkoutlines” reports such lines.

6

Mekka, thanks for the tips.

I use the Shift-click an awful lot, it’s very useful.
But for that you need to know that you’re missing extremes, which is where some kind of mark or warning would be useful.

I did not know about the Layer > Add Extremes command, this will also be very useful I’m sure.

There used to be a Fontlab macro called FontQA (or similar), do you know it? Can it be ran in Glyphs?
If I remember correctly, it would list what glyphs have what problems in a html file report.