Kerning classes and lock icons have me confused

Glyphs
1

Hello,

I understand that kerning classes are a property of a glyph and that you can make exceptions for individual pairs that override the class settings.

With the cursor between a pair, sometimes I’m editing the class setting and sometimes I’m editing an individual pair setting but it’s not clear to me when I’m doing what.

Do the locks signify that there’s an exception for this pair or that we’re following the class rule? Or something else?

How do you toggle the locks? I can click them and they have an “active/mousedown” state that leads me to believe that they do something but clicking dosen’t appear to toggle anything. If they’re not there I can get them by adding a K value but I don’t know if this is for the group or the pair. The only way I can get them to go away is by deleting the K value twice – the first time it sometimes changes the K value to a different vale (changing the pair value to the class value? but the lock remains), if I delete that value again it actually clears the field and the lock disappears. Adding any K value after that makes the lock re-appear (and the value appears to be for the class, rather than the individual pair?).

So I think I’m misunderstanding the whole setup. I guess my main questions are:

  1. What are the locks supposed to signify?
  2. How am I supposed to toggle them?

bonus question: What does the “Compress” button in the kerning palette do? Sometimes it makes the number of pairs go up & sometimes it makes it go down…

Thanks!

2

The locks mean that you’re setting that specific glyph’s kerning to be the same as the kerning of other glyphs in your kerning class. So if you’re editing a Q “locked” it will affect the O if both have the same left/right class. Toggle them whenever you need them to be equal to the other glyphs in the same class, untoggle when you need to make exceptions.

3

Thanks that helps.
But how is toggling supposed to work? I click the locks and after mouseup nothing visually has changed from before mousedown?

4

eeeps
What version do you have?

5

I was on an early version of the new Mini [1.0.3 (19)] but I just updated through the App Store to 1.0.3 (21) and the lock now locks and unlocks. Much more understandable now! (:

(In addition to the lock not actually toggling…before during mousedown a rectangle around the lock would darken, now just the lock does)

I still wouldn’t mind an answer to the bonus question… what does the “Compress” button do?

Thanks!

6

Just a quick extra bit of info–it actually only darkens when the mouse is down between “lock” and “unlock” now–between “lock” and “unlock” it stays the same shade. Dunno if this is a minor bug or what. The important thing is that I can now see and change the state!