When drawing new paths with the pen tool, you can hold down space to simultaneously move the position of the point (same behavior as Illustrator and very useful for free form drawing). However, when editing points on shapes that are already drawn, pressing space has no effect. Rather, you must first rotate a handle, then separately click the point to move it, making it impossible to alter both the rotation and position of a point in a single move. Why does this discrepancy exist? I don’t see a downside to including this functionality, and it also doesn’t appear that ‘space’ is already being used for a different function when editing shapes.
The behavior I’m referring to is at :25 in this Glyphs tutorial:
I’ll have a look.
There is a way to do what you are trying to do that works with corner nodes at least. But it uses only the keyboard. Select the oncurve node, then move it as you wish. when you like to change the angle, hold the Option key. This will move the node without the handles.
Thanks for the reply @GeorgSeifert — similar, but not exactly what I am hoping for. I’m working on a font with very organic outlines because the origins are scanned calligraphy. It’s less important that my strokes are exact thicknesses or that curves are exact radii. It’s still easier to draw in Illustrator and paste into Glyphs for this kind of glyph shape due to the capabilities such as holding down space to simultaneously manipulate both the point and the handles in a freeform way.
I’ve noticed a similar difference for rotation of a point: in Illustrator, if a point is selected and the rotation tool is activated, it’s assumed that rotation will occur at the center of the point unless you click elsewhere to designate a different origin. It’s frustrating to me that in Glyphs you must specify the origin every single time even though you almost always want to rotate at the center of the point you’ve selected. Is there a way to alter this as the default behavior? Or at least turn off the “memory” aspect where it uses the same rotation point as the last rotation?
That was a long reply, and slightly off topic from the original post, and as a beginner in both font design and Glyphs, I’d understand if there are logical reasons for these kinds of things.
I also find it very cumbersome. One workaround is to use the transform palette, it will use the transformation origin that you set in the little bounding box, but then you have to guess the angle.
can you make a small screencast how you use the rotate tool?
Long overdue follow up @GeorgSeifert with screen recordings as requested:
When moving the handles of an anchor point in Illustrator, you can simultaneously hold down space to enable the anchor to also move. This is incredibly useful when building organic shapes as you can see in real time what the combined outcome of a rotation and transformation will look like. In Glyphs, this outcome requires performing those steps separately and with more guesswork.
Rotation is the other behavior I was referencing. When you select one or more points, and then activate the rotation tool, the origin of the function defaults to the mathematical center of the bounding box. You only need to designate the origin if it needs to be elsewhere. To me, this feels more practical than forcing the user to continually choose the origin or making the assumption that the previous origin point will be used multiple times.
Lastly, another default behavior I appreciate is the fixed relationship between anchors and handles. If you select a point and perform a transformation on it, the length and angle of the handles remains the same. To change the handles, you must select the handles. In Glyphs, it seems like I have to use the marquee or lasso to select both handles in addition to the anchor if I want to retain their relative relationship. I get that this last point is probably a totally subjective approach to workflow, and I’ve seen demonstrations of the scenario where you actually want the anchor to move independently from its handles.
Really curious to hear your take on this. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m aware that the font I’m working on is kind of an outlier for the Glyphs app as it doesn’t rely so much on exact mathematical values or geometry, and that the app wasn’t designed to accommodate freeform drawing like Illustrator. With that being said, I do think simple features like the “spacebar to move” functionality would be useful for everyone.
The space dragging when an offcurve node is dragged is interesting. I put it on my list.
I need to think about the automatic transform origin a bit more.