Great,
Thanks for the input!
Just to be certain of the workflow. Keep all of the Masters on Regular, and just change the Weight values, and custom name on export?
Super! Thanks for your great troubleshooting!
Yes. Just make sure you create instances with:
- the exact same weight values as the masters
- a different name for each instance
Hi guys,
I am using Glyphs.app with some projects, specially making shaping. What is really handy with Glyphs.app is the possibility to manage all “weights” of the family through Masters. So, for example a Family with UltraLight, Thin, Text, Medium and Semibold weights will fit with the 5 Glyph master tags (Light, SemiLight, Regular, SemiBold, Bold).
The problem is that once you used those five Master tags, you don’t have another way to identify those Master, excepting using Master Index, or Master ID.
I have been working in a suite of Scripts that place anchors for Arabic glyphs, using the Master names to access to the proper dictionary of Y coordinates. If I work with Master Index, the sort order of the Masters will be independent of the weight that is actually linked for each master. If I work with Master ID, each ID will be unique in each font. So far using Master name have been handy, because it is linked to the Weight Value and also has allowed me to use the script in different fonts no matter if they differs in number of Master or if the Masters are containing other weights.
The problem with this approach is when a font exceed the five Weight/Masters, names are duplicated without having a suffix.
At the end, through the UI I can access to the proper Master but through scripting I need a common and distinctive value to identify a Master.
So, I wonder if there is a way to assign a custom name to the Master Layer without compromising all the actions related to the Layer, such as brace a bracket trick.
Best,
Nicolás
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Use custom field, or width. In Glyphs 1 wherein there were three options for each, I had a typeface of four masters, and I made one of them as Bold Extended. It works just fine.
Thanksset the first to names to Regular and then only the content of the Custom field will be used as a name.
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I’m still interested in making the naming of weights and widths in masters more open-ended. Using the “Custom” proportion is fine for an attribute other than weight or width, but we don’t want to have to hack ‘Custom’ to let us add a master named something like “Black Condensed”, or “Ultra-light Wide”. If the static list of names is only about the use of the icons, why not replace the icons with the actual rendering of specific user-defined glyphs from the font data? It would provide much more flexibility to designers, and be far more intuitive when it comes to mapping names of masters to instances.
Live icon? Dangerous. What if there is a problem with the glyph? E.g. it is not there or has a faulty component reference, or if there is an outline error, or a very complex outline that slows the app down?
Why do you need so fine grained names for the masters. They are only used for the icons and in the layer panel. So the names don’t need to be typographicly cortect. That’s what the instances are there for.
When there is a difference between the naming of a master and an instance generated from that master it makes it confusing to communicate with other people working on a font. I cannot tell someone “look at the ‘B’ in the Bold” and be sure they know what I want them to look at. Bold instance or Bold Master? SemiBold instance or SemiBold Master?
Ha, that is why I always say Bold Master.