Glyphs/Fontself file size

Glyphs
1

Hi there,

I’ve been doing some experimenting with bitmap SVG colour fonts. My experiments led me to seeing what Fontself could do as it streamlines the image importing part of the process.

However I need to be able to further adjust things and tweak vertical metrics and opentype etc, this can’t be done in fontself. So I then open the .otf (24.7mb) generated by fontself and convert it to a glyphs file.

Once I’ve edited and renamed and remade things in glyphs I then export the .otf from glyphs but now i’m getting a much larger file size (Almost double 42.7mb)

I’m not adding any extra glyphs so I’m wondering why theres such a big variation in file size with glyphs adding so much data?

My process in converting the fontself .otf to a glyphs file means I open it and delete all the SVG layers and instead use the custom parameter ‘SBIX to SVG’ I then add some opentype, adjust some verticle metrics and fiddle with the naming a little. Nothing that should be adding a lot of data.

The thing I’ve noticed that could be linked to the file size is when I save the converted glyphs file the corresponding Image folder contains .tiff images that seem large, especially compared to the much smaller .svg images that are in the fontself .otf file.

Any ideas why glyphs exports much larger bitmap svg fonts?

Any help much appreciated.

2

You probably get a SBIX and a SVG table. Add an “Export sbix Table” custom parameter to the instance and uncheck the box.

3

Hi Georg,

I tried, and doing that gets the file back very close to the original size… but it no longer has the iColor sbix layers in the font anymore. The Original .otf (and fonts generated in fontself) have both iColour and svg layers.

4

Can you send me the original font file?

5

Sure, just sent them to support @ (this domain) .com. Thanks

6

It seem that Glyphs recompresses the PNG files and does a not so good job with it. I’ll see if I can improve that.