Revisiting this because there is a slightly different circumstance to consider: I already have the glyphs named “zero.superior” and “zero.inferior” made in my file. If I use Rainer’s recipe, Glyphs gives an error message that they exist already. So I can’t use the recipe unless the glyphs DON’T exist. In FL the simple solution was one of the many conditions of Paste Special: Paste as component. In this situation, it really would be simpler for me to use Paste Special to get composites of my numerator outlines into the other glyph positions and then transform their positions. Writing, or saving such a formula would be more fuss, because I might not have the same outlines to start with in a different file.
Since Carl revived the thread I’ll jump in, too. In Kannada it’s possible for a glyph to be built from multiple components that contain a base anchor that one or more other components can attach to. For example, ya includes a circle, two instances of the u vowel mark, and a headline. It’s likely that all but the circle are components, and the circle might be as well. The headline attaches to the first u mark, but there are also one or two other components it could anchor to. And ya can be used as a component in yaa by adding the aa mark to the second uu. If would be nice if I could choose an anchor from among components when putting such complex glyphs together.
Are you saying the glyphs exist, but are empty, and you need to fill them with components? What is wrong Cmd-Shift-C to insert components? And you can copy and paste components if you need the same component again.
Yes, Rainer, that is correct. The problem with your method is scale: I typically make numerators as outlines, and then I want to copy the whole set of 10 to denominators, and superiors, and inferiors, and then I want to shift them (with transformations). Also, it is very likely that my file has 2-8 masters in it, so I’d like to get everything from all masters pasted in as composites, with the original metrics. So in this scenario, inserting one component, then copying that and pasting that into other masters, one at a time, for each of 10 glyphs, 3 times over, is not efficient.
Why not deleting the existing glyphs? Not ideal, either. I have a look how to improve this.
Just bumping this topic because I need to make my inferiors, denominators and numerators in two Multi-master files, and am hoping to do it quickly…
What exactly was the problem with overwriting the existing glyphs? If you can delete or rename them (as a backup), I would suggest compound copies as above, Glyph > Add Glyphs (Cmd-Shift-G):
one.numr=one.dnom
two.numr=two.dnom
… and so on. Then I would set the metric keys to =one.numr, =two.numr, etc. Then I would move them down with Filter > Transformations > Transform, and Glyph > Update Metrics (Cmd-Ctrl-M). You could also automate that with a simple script. Is that