I’m attempting to use Glyphs for a project in which I have a collaborator who is working on Cyrillics. I use Git to version my work, and to merge collaborative work. We were working purely in UFOs for most of the project, and that has its difficulties, but things tend to merge without too many headaches. However, we have recently migrated this into a Glyphs project, because we want to use a couple of key plugins (Mini Proofer and KernOn).
There are many things I love about Glyphs! I am constantly recommending it to people who ask me what font editor they should use.
However… I’m still trying to get used to using it effectively with Git.
The biggest problem I’m currently facing: if I work on some drawing, spacing, and kerning (using KernOn) in my main
branch, then do a Git Pull Request to merge that work into the cyrillic
branch, a bunch of kerning data & groups are mysteriously lost. Basic things like ATA AVA
lose kerning and groups.
Of course, this might be related to the use of KernOn, but I don’t think that entirely explains it. After all, KernOn is partly just making groups and adding kerns. It also adds a few things into UserData, but I don’t think it should be enough to break merges like this…
Ultimately, I can rescue kerning by using MergeGlyphs, but is there a more direct solution, or does the Glyphs format just not work well in Git? I know there are tons of projects that use both, so my hope is that I’m just missing some technique that will make it work better.
FWIW, my collaborator and I are both on version 3.1 (3133), and using the file format version 2. (Would file version 3 do any better in Git?)
I’ve already set a couple of Custom Parameters to avoid at least some diffing noise:
I’m happy to email a before/after version of the Glyphs source, if that would be helpful for diagnosing things.
Thanks so much for any insight!