Hey Rainer, I can’t really show anything here, but my point is that things like x-height and slant have an influence over the offset of certain glyphs, ex:
- high x-height, moderate slant: Glyphs default will work rather well
- low x-height, steep slant, or combination of both: the offset of capitals, lining figures, high punctuation etc might go past what a designer consider acceptable. You may push the point that what’s important is the fitting of lowercase, and that’s not necessarily a wrong choice, but it’s still a choice and one that the designer should be in control of.
Another example when you have varying x-heights in a family, you might still want to have the bounding box slanted from the same point, again, that should be a conscious choice depending on intended use, design features or production process.
A few months ago I made a little bit of research on several fonts to see if there was any consensus about this: I found a good number doing what Glyphs does by default, but an equally good number of fonts that use half cap-height as origin point (I might remember wrong but I think Font Bureau fonts are like this?), which again, depending on design or intended use, can be an equally good choice as half x-height. And also, a few cases where the pivot point was somewhere in between half x-height and half cap height, a solution that will center nothing but might provide an adequate result for all italic glyphs (again from memory, Proxima Nova is like this? maybe Roboto as well?).
Anyway I hope you see my point. If that is too niche to invest dev time I get it, especially because there are still workarounds, but I think it’s an interesting thing to discuss as it’s one of these where Glyphs maybe is a little bit too opinionated?