Illegal Anchor position in a very wide font

[djrrb (David Jonathan Ross)]

New Font 2000.glyphs (19.3 KB)

In the latest version 3.5 (3525), I get the following error when trying to export a 2000 upm variable font with a very wide extreme:

Illegal Anchor position in sad-ar: The Coordinate is too far

I am fine if Glyphs wants to warn about anchors with unusual coordinates, but I expected Glyphs to be able to export the font regardless.

The font exports as expected if I scale the font to 1000 UPM.

The font exports as expected at 2000 UPM in the latest stable release 3.4.1 (3436).

I have attached a simplified demo file to illustrate the problem.

I was able to get a working export using 3.4.1, so there’s no rush on my end to fix this…just figured I’d let you know!

Much appreciated,
David

[composerjk (Jeff Kellem (composerjk))]

Looks like that check got added in 3.5 (3523). So, going back to 3.5 (3522) or before would also work.

Glyphs implementation likely just needs to adjust the calculation for what might be considered too far as reasonable based on UPM and consider changing to a warning. I haven’t seen the case that caused the check to get added. I expect it should be a simple fix.

[GeorgSeifert]

The check seems to be a bit too harsh. But I just did some more test. The limit is not related to the UPM but about the absolute values. There is a limit what the format can store. But that is seldom a problem. Some apps (Adobe) cause problems much earlier. e.g. a CFF based font is not allowing coordinates bigger than ~10000 units.
this is a screenshot from Indesign. Top is TTF below is CFF.

(this is made from your font scaled to 4000)

So It seems that anchors are fine to be bigger (this is at 18400).

I’m hesitant to allow maximum technical possible as it might cause rendering issues.

[aminabedi68 (Amin)]

same here with upm=2048 while exporting as variable/static ttf:

Is this going to be fixed? I hadn’t encountered any rendering issues before, and it seems there’s no other way to implement it.

[GeorgSeifert]

Yes. I fixed it already. Will be in the next update.