Glyphs crashing when trying to export

Glyphs
1

The Glyphs app is crashing every time I export my font. The font was designed in Illustrator and has a rough texture so there are a lot of points, is it too messy or too many for Glyphs to handle? If so, how do I clean it up without losing the desired texture?

Thanks

2

Have you read this: https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials/creating-fonts-with-complex-outlines

And can you send me the .glyphs file. It should not crash…

3

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TKRjjEIadQ4MqZCHhctO-kwoN998QTvF/view?usp=sharing

I’m new to Glyphs and really have no idea what I’m doing! Any help would be appreciated :slight_smile:

4

What export settings did you use?

5

From a quick test, I didn’t reproduce the crash during export, though it failed to export due to too many nodes. The d glyph, for example, contains over 40,000 nodes. Glancing at it, there seem to be multiple paths on top of each other that are nearly the same. They don’t seem to be exact path matches, but very close. Maybe 3 copies on top of each other. I zoomed in close enough to select a path by double clicking the path and then moved it away.

Did you perhaps run whatever illustrator texture tool multiple times? It seemed odd to have the overlapping paths where most were hidden or about the same.

I’d need to look further to suggest the best ways to clean them up.

Running Remove Overlap fails, of course, with the error message Something went wrong with the Remove Overlap filter. Which might also be seen during the export failure.

6

After restarting my computer Glyphs is no longer crashing but I am getting the same error messages as you. The letters were distorted manually using a photocopier and then I used Illustrator to vectorize them. How can I clean them up without sacrificing texture?

7

There is a limit on how much texture you can get into one glyph.

If you really need that texture, maybe don’t vectorize in the first place and build a color font? That can’t be scaled so easily but with some planing you can get very nice result.

8
  • Tidy up your outlines. Paths > Tidy Up Path should help get rid of unnecessary nodes.
  • Simplify your outlines. Consider turning curve segments into straight segments. There is a plug-in called Retractor which does exactly that. Find it in Window > Plugin Manager.
  • Consider applying a filter like Filter > Roughen on your outlines. With the right settings, it will reduce the number of nodes in your outlines. You can see a node count in the grey info box as soon as a point is selected, all the way to the right:
    image

And it is a very good idea to read the tutorial that Georg linked to above.