Force update of automatic alignment

1

Hello, I am getting increasingly annoyed by the bevhaviour of automatic alignment not updating properly. Numerous times, this has messed up either version control, exports, or kerning.

When I open a file in a different version of Glyphs, I get the trusty old warning that alignment was changed and needs to be checked manually again. Is there any of way of forcing an update of all alignments in a Glyphs file? This would save me about half my commits which are solely due to updated “automatic” alignment. Opening all glyphs in Edit view and tabbing through all masters isn’t enough.

Thanks!

1 Like
2

I was just going to ask the same question (I believe).

What I sometimes do is to open the .glyphs file in a text editor and change the .appVersion entry to a smaller number. The next time I open the file in the current version of Glyphs, the updates are triggered.

  • Is there a more elegant way of (manually) triggering alignment updates than the hack described above?
  • Why doesn’t Glyphs always recognize the out-of-date alignment itself, including when the file is opened with the same version? Always triggering the check on file open should be trivial.
3

The version alignment check with different versions was added because once in a while, the alignment algorithm is changing (because if a fixed bug). Running it every time would slow down the file opening quite a bit. And Glyphs should run the alignment when saving. I might need to check if that is working properly.

4

Thanks for the information. I had a feeling it was about performance.

Is there a way to trigger the check manually?

5

you can iterate all layers and call:

// objectiveC
[layer doAlignComponents];

or

# python
layer.doAlignComponents()

But I really wonder why it is not done when saving.

6

I am rather confused now.

• Yesterday, I exported the final version of a big project for an important client, using Glyphs 3508. Of course, I wouldn’t update the Glyphs version in the last minute.

• Today, I updated to Glyphs 3509.

• Glyphs 3509 tells me that some if the alignments are wrong. Oh no! This means that I gave flawed fonts to me client yesterday!

• … after an hour of TTXing and other testing and comparisons, it turns out that the files exported with Glyphs 3509 (after it auto-fixed the alignment) are practically no different from the ones with the flawed alignment yesterday.

What exactly is going on? Seems like the behaviour of Glyphs has changed since our above discussion in March? Can you clarify?

My suspicion is that the auto-fixing of wrong alignment always happens but we only get the notification if the version has changed, otherwise it is done secretly – and, therefore, applied before exporting fonts, but not stored in the .glyphs file unless you explicitly save it, which means the exported fonts and the .glyphs file don’t even match. What a mess.