Import linked sidebearings & kern groups?

Glyphs
1

You mentioned at TypeCon that you might make it possible to import kern groups and sidebearing linkages from one file to another. Did this ever happen? It would certainly save a lot of time and mistakes if I didn’t have to manually enter identical data glyph by glyph for each member of a large family.

Many thanks!

2

There is a script called Steal Groups, which replicates the kerning groups.

The Metrics Keys (=the SB formulas) are a little more complex. Are you on Glyphs 2 already?

3

Not on v2 yet. If it makes this sort of thing easier, it’s worth it. Should I upgrade?

Perhaps in some future build, Import/Metrics would bring up a popup with checkboxes for things like Sidebearings, Kerning, Kerning Groups, and Sidebearings Formulas? This would let you import what you wanted and only what you wanted.

While I’m being greedy, another thing that would be incredibly handy is a sort of spellcheck function that complains when you enter the name of a nonexistent glyph. I’m always breaking my kerning by entering things like , or <a.salt> where I should actually be typing <a.ss01>.

Thanks!

4
When changing the name of an existing glyph, you could start typing it and wait a second, and Glyphs will autocomplete, or give you suggestions if there are many possibilities.

If you are creating those glyphs, you might as well pick them from the Languages foldouts in the Font Tab sidebar. You know, right click e.g. Central European, select all, generate.

Making .ss01 variants: Select the glyphs > Duplicate (Cmd-D) > Find and Replace (Cmd-Shift-F) > Replace “.001” with “.ss01”.

And i the worst case, in Font Tab, you can scroll down and look under “Other”, because this is where all glyphs go where the app does not recognize the names. At least you have them all in one place. :slight_smile:

5
It should ask you already if you want to import Kerning and/or Kerning Classes (should be named 'Groups'). For sidebearings, there is my Steal Sidebearings script.

The only thing that is missing is the Metrics Keys (our official wording for the formulas).

6

Sorry—what I meant was, when you’re entering kerning groups, and you enter a name in the field that doesn’t match any glyph in the font, it would be great if Glyphs highlighted your error somehow. I don’t mean that I wanted help naming glyphs in the first place.

As for the popup, I can see why I wasn’t getting any satisfaction; I wasn’t selecting any glyphs to import to. I expected Glyphs to import values for the whole font. Now I know better, and this is good to have. Thanks for explaining, and for the speedy response.

But being able to import the Metrics Keys would be very, very nice.

7
But that is not necessarily an error. Group names do not have to match glyph names. That is just a convention some people use. So I do not think it should be a program function, but I could write a script for that.
8
The names of the kerning groups can be anything. To generate the kerning classes, all glyphs that have the same text as a group name will be put in the same class. Some people prefer to use names like 'LC_round', 'UC_diagonal'...
9

Thanks for the clarification, Rainer and Georg. And thanks doubly for the offer of the script, Rainer; that would be terrific.

On a related topic: when I try to import kerning & kern groups, the Kerning checkbox in Import Metrics is grayed out; only the Kerning Groups checkbox is functional. What am I doing wrong?