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?