I’ve licensed a font for my brand that I haven’t created myself, and need to ensure that my website and my content creator always use specific alternates—namely the versions of B, R, and P from Stylistic Set 6—across various software and on the web.
I’m wondering:
Can I open the original .otf or .ttf in Glyphs, modify the default glyphs (e.g. swap R with R.ss06), and simply save or export the font for reinstalling—without breaking anything?
Also, if exporting is required, will Glyphs retain the original font’s export settings (naming, metrics, features, etc.), or do I need to manually reconfigure certain parameters? If so, is there a way to inspect or replicate the original settings without this technical knowledge?
Firstly, check that the license of the font allows for such modifications. If not, contact the font vendor with your request.
If it does, it’s still not a great idea to open an .otf or .ttf file in Glyphs. Glyphs can do this, but there is some inherent data loss that happens in this step. Unless you have access to the source files of the font (.glyphs, .glyphspackage, .ufo), I would advise against using Glyphs in this case.
If all you want to do is bake certain alternative glyphs in so they are active by default, then there are dedicated tools that can do this with minimal data loss. Sometimes, the vendor of the font offers such a tool directly for their font catalog.
Thank you for your reply.
I will certainly check the agreement before proceeding to implement this.
The type foundry has ceased to exist, there is no way of contacting them. I have the name of one of the authors, but I am unable to find any record of his name online.
In any case, I will look into the legal side of things, but for this thread it would be great to learn how to do this technically. Could you elaborate a bit on the software you are referring to that might be able to provide a solution to my problem?
For webfonts, there is the Fontsquirrel Webfont Generator with the OpenType Flattening option in the Expert mode. Otherwise, I’m not sure what today’s go-to tools are for this.