I created some accent characters using Glyph > Make Component Glyph
Ignore the crazy mark positioning, i’m still figuring that out.
The thing I can’t figure out is why the resulting characters are much wider than the original letters
The right sidebearing of cap A is 27. Aacute says “(auto) 478”, while the rest of the A marks correctly say “(auto) 27”.
Cap E is 17, and all the marks say “(auto) 361”
John
Maybe check acutecomb and make sure its width is zero.
Thanks for the suggestion. It’s making the component from A and acute. I don’t have acutecomb.
I set the width of acute to zero, deleted the components and redid “make component glyph”, same result. Width is “auto (478)” when it should be “auto (27)”.
I did notice one thing all the improperly spaced composite glyphs have in common – their width is 1000. So they’re not changing to the spacing of the master letter when the component is generated.
acute is a spacing character–acutecomb (combining acute accent) is the non-spacing character. Glyphs will use acutecomb to build the glyph with acute if it’s present. So here’s the sequence:
Add a glyph acutecomb. Glyphs should automatically make it with a component from acute. Set the width of acutecomb to zero (you normally position the acute itself somewhat to the left of the vertical line) and type Command-U to add a “_top” anchor. It will add the anchor in very nearly the right place.
Open up A, E, O, etc. All the glyphs that can take an acute accent. For each of these, type Command-U to add a “top” anchor.
Select Aacute, Eacute, Oacute, etc. in the font grid and do Glyph–>Make Component Glyph. Now Glyphs should make the component glyphs correctly.
The width of the combining accents doesn’t need to be zero. Glyphs will set it to zero on export.
I wiuld suspect missing anchor are causing this.
Adding anchors and creating comb accents did indeed generate characters of the proper width.
That doesn’t explain why the others would stay at 1000 (or why we need separate comb accents in the first place) but at least it’s working.
thanks for the help,
John
This is nice to know.
Accents are always combined in Latin. So the real question is: why do we need separate non-comb accents? This is explained in detail in the Diacritics tutorial: