Marks and Anchors

Hello,

I am currently making accented characters for a font. I read a couple of articles about setting up diacritics.

I would like to nudge my grave and acute accents in order to make them look optically centered for one specific character (they look fine for most other characters). I know how to add new anchors for a character. However, I don’t see a way to align marks to the newly created anchor point. How can this be done?

Thank you,
-Sam

Just horizontally move the _top anchor in the acutecomb/gravecomb/hungarumlautcomb until the marks look horizontally centred in their connecting base glyphs.

I always find position for the “_top” anchor in the gravecomb and acutecomb that makes it look good on all glyphs. You can add an alternate “top” anchor on some base glyphs (like “top.shift”). in the composite glyphs, select the accent and there should be an anchor button in the info box. There you can select to what anchor to align too.

I think that there is a misunderstanding. Perhaps a screenshot would better illustrate my problem. The grave and acute accents look correct for the “W” because the bottoms align with the peak of the two diagonal lines in the center. However, they don’t quite feel optically centered for the square “A” (the same goes for other accent marks with diagonals).

If I moved the _top anchor in the combining marks, I would solve the misalignment problem for characters like “A” but create new misalignment problems for characters like “W.”

I have attached screenshots of the “Thin” and “Black” weight of my font.


I tried creating new anchors for base characters before. However, I did not see an anchor button when selecting the combining mark for the specific character. Is the name “top.shift” a keyword that lets Glyphs know you intend to create a secondary top anchor?

No, you can name the extra anchors anything you want, they just have to start with the name of the default anchor followed by a separator. If the base anchor is top, you can name the custom one top_thingy or top.blah, but it won’t work if you call it topnew (no separator after the base anchor name) or toop_wobba (doesn’t start with the base anchor name).

The anchor button should show up as soon as there are multiple anchors to choose from. See Reusing shapes # Anchors to see where the anchor button appears and what it looks like.

In this case, use a period instead of an underscore (those are used for ligature anchors).

I think the bottom of the grave and acute should not be centered but be a little bit to the side. And that little bit can be set to work on wide and narrow letters.

The Wacute/grave is only used in Welsh. And this page has some examples: Underware

Thank you. I have another question related to anchors:

I tried adjusting the anchors for an intermediate layer I created for a character. Is this supported? It only seemed to work for the thinnest and boldest version of the font which are actual masters.

For the medium weight of my font, the Ogonek is misaligned at the edge of the “E.” I would like the top right edge of the Ogonek to match up perfectly with the bottom right corner of the "E.
Screenshot 2024-10-28 at 4.41.07 PM
"

Could you send me that file?