I thought of a feature for the context menu of the Font Overview. At the moment: if you right/ctlr-click a (list of) glyph(s) you can choose »copy letter name« – so far so good (for the use in classes, the pasting without the »/« would be great, though).
BUT: Wouldn’t it be nice to have something like »send to class XY« as well?
With that feature one could keep ones classes up to date during the design process easily.
Perhaps it could offer a list of all cutrently existing classes?
The slash before the glyph name is a convention from FontLab. So you need to use a text editor to search and replace the slash with space ore line breaks and then you can use it in the classes.
And to your question: Let’s say you work on a design, wich has tons of ligatures in upper and lower case, alternate glyphs, stylistic sets and so on, since it is kind of a script and needs that certain livelyness – now, when it comes to programming all that stuff for making many things automatic for the end-user, it can become really tricky to have all the newly added glyphs up to date in all features. just think of classes like @letter oder @lowercase.
Everytime I decide to add a certain glyph to the alphabet, i have to check, if it is present then in all features, which depend on its presence to work correctly.
Or e.g. classes, which hold special characters for certain calt features. if you have a, n, m, i, … in there, and every glyph gets several alternatives, and later on all of them their diacritics … you get the point?
since i come to that point qite often, i just thought, if the »copy letter name« function exists, couldn’t it be just a further step to make such a thing working. If my procedure should reveal a very unconventional an suboptimal workflow and no-one else would consider this as helpful, then don’t bother. this was just an idea so far. kinda brainstorming
These kinds of “shortcuts” might be nice on some point. to many of those clutter the app.
So, can you use a filter to only show the glyphs you like? Then copy all the names and put them in the class. This takes a few clicks but you don’t do it that often.
you are perhaps right on that point with a cluttering potential. on the other hand perhaps every idea could have been criticized before it established.
the filtering does not really work here:
if one builds a filter e.g.: »some of the conditions is true« and then either »name is« or »name begins with« … now the problem is, that if one lists some conditions with »a«, »b«, … then you get only »a« and »b«, … – or if you took »begins with«, then you get also »ampersand«, »asciitilde«, »backslash« and what so ever.
and if you try the preset filters under »letters«, e.g. »lowercase« then not all lowercase letters are shown (ligatures are hidden then)
so perhaps the options in the filtermenu could get a thing like »category« and »sub category« or so. then one could filter »lowercase« and »ligatures« (as an example)
I did not necessarily meant the custom filter. You can use the category filter like Letter > lowercase (and combine it with a custom filter if you like, select two row with cmd pressed)
yes, that was what i meant with »preset filter«, didn’t get the right term.
ok, I was not aware of the possibility of combining them with the cmd key, thats great and seem to work for most cases. unfortunately I also have uppercase ligatures, which still appear when only selecting lc and ligs … but I will try to build me a workaround.
resumé: everything great as usual, thank you georg!
