For those of you who enjoy drawing your glyphs in Affinity Designer, this template may come in handy (Tresorit link below). It is set up to copy/paste the vectors over to the Glyphs app 1:1.
Affinity Designer does not currently allow for global guides for multiple art boards (which is really annoying, but that is another subject). So I’ve set this up with a guide layer that is saved as a symbol. You can edit the symbol to change the guides to fit the metrics of your font. Currently, they mirror these metrics in Glyphs:
All art boards have a 10-base grid and are sized to 1,000 x 1,300. This is sort of a work-in-progress so if you have any thoughts on how to add to/improve this template, I’m all ears. While this template is completely free to use and modify, if you find this incredibly useful, toss a few coins my direction: Venmo | Tom Puckett
I find I work quite a bit faster using the tools in Affinity Designer. I prefer to do the initial design in AD, then use Glyphs for fine tuning. I don’t think there is anything necessarily “missing” from the tools in Glyphs (except for maybe a symbols tool), so I suppose it’s just a matter of preference.
There is not any need for such a tool in any font editor. Drawing symbols would occupy less than 1% of a typical designer’s lifetime of drawing characters.
The same could be said of the rectangle and circle tools, but Glyphs has those. I would personally welcome a triangle, diamond, trapezoid and polygon tool as well – you may not need them frequently, but they’re nice to have.
Arrows, cogs, callouts, hearts, QR codes and so on are probably venturing into the realm of the truly useless in a font editor, but a few more basic shapes could be quite useful nice-to-haves.
Glyphs has those because they are primitives and certainly have their uses. I will stick with my “less than 1% in your lifetime” comment for anything else. Sure, some things might be nice to have, but at what cost to the programmers time just to cover that less than 1% need?
I don’t really have a fixed workflow and generally jump between programs that best suit my needs. For example, I use Illustrator when I need to take advantage of the auto trace feature. But copying/pasting a vector from Illustrator to Glyphs is an exercise in frustration. Which is where Affinity Designer comes in handy. It works wonderfully and the integrity of the outlines are perfectly preserved when transferring to Glyphs. No scaling or “Unusual Bounds” issues. Just a 1:1 paste without the funk. I use Glyphs primarily as a production tool, not a design tool.
Thanks for that link! I generally avoid pasting vectors from Illustrator, but it’s good to know there are solutions. Pasting from Designer into Glyphs (at least with my template), places the outlines at 0,0. Is that what you mean by “lower left corner”? I don’t use Designer for general positioning, just drawing.
you shouldn’t. As I fare as I know it is actually better (but maybe a bit more work to get it ti work correctly). e.g. you can get vertical placement right if you have a row of glyphs. From Designer, you need to move all glyphs with descender or overshoot down?
