Kerning not applied in composed ligature, even when "Auto alignment" is enabled. Why?

Glyphs
1

I’m building a font with some ligatures that are defined in custom GlyphData.

Some of them use a customized short hyphen, for ligatures like -a-. However, in the base font, the spacing of -a- doesn’t look very even. So, I want to kern the a- pair to look better.

I would expect this kerning to be automatically reflected in the -a- ligature, but for some reason, it isn’t. I do have “Automatic alignment” enabled.

Here’s an image:

image
image1290×1454 77.8 KB

I’ve posted a screen recording at:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4c78j5pm4uv1yd0hvu6av/Screen-Recording-2025-03-23-at-5.10.13-PM.mov?rlkey=kelrj6817qvdaq50d7ji38x4u&dl=0

Am I missing something, or is this a bug?

I can email fonts directly, if that would be helpful.

I’m in Glyphs 3.4 (3402).

Thanks for any pointers or insights!

2

Please send me the font.

3

Ah, taking another look before sending the font, I just have realized the problem, and it was my fault:

My /hyphen_a_hyphen glyph uses not only a customized, separate hyphen, but also a separate /a. When I created the custom /a and custom /hyphen, I should have probably copied over the kerning groups from their parents, and I didn’t do so. So, of course when I was kerning the custom hyphen against the /a that is not actually a component in /hyphen_a_hyphen, there was no change to /hyphen_a_hyphen.

Sorry for the false alarm! Thanks for being willing to take a look at it, though.

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