Recently I had to make a bold version of an existing font used by a newspaper. I was requested to exactly match the original glyph names and glyph order. It was impossible to make it with Glyphs, in the end I had to generate the TTFs in FL because Glyphs was always changing the name of some glyphs, even when I had “Use custom naming” selected.
There should be a way to have full control of the glyph names of generated fonts because otherwise Glyphs won’t be a good production tool.
There is a setting in Preferences that prevents Glyphs form changing names on import. That corresponds to the “Use Custom Naming” in font info. And then there is the custom parameter “Don’t use Production Names”.
Sorry, It doesn´t work well. Even having the parameter “Don’t use Production Names” checked, the glyphname ‘periodcentered’ was changed to ‘middot’ and its position changed.
How are you checking the exported glyph names? “periodcentered” is one of the standard glyph names and thus not stored in a font’s “post” table. The glyph name will be assigned by the editor when you import a font. E.g. FontLab 5 does it wrong and calls it “middot”. This affects a handful of other glyph names as well.
I am opening the generated font in FL5. But the original font provided by the client opens well and does not rename periodcentered. Why then when I open the Glyphs generated file periodcentered has turned into middot?
Now I see that if I open the TTF with other editors the name is still ‘periodcentered’. And FL5 seems to only change the name when it’s opening a TTF, not a PS1 font. Strange.
FontLab 5 stores the name “periodcentered” in the post table even though it is not strictly required. So the name will not change when you import the font in FontLab 5 again.
Other editors will not store the name “periodcentered”, and in this case the editor assigns a name on import. Some will name the glyph “periodcentered”, some (FL5) will name it “middot”.
Not sure if/how Glyphs could make it possible to store arbitrary names in the post table.
You could fix up the fonts from Glyphs by adding an entry for periodcentered in a ttx dump in the post table under “extraNames”.