after some refining I just made a plugin of mine public that I have found very useful to use when working with glyphs that don’t occur in languages I am familiar with.
Wordfinder quickly finds words containing the selected glyphs either in font view or in a tab. From a dictionary only those words will be picked that a) contain the glyphs you have selected and b) can be written with your font. Note that this is ideal selecting one or only a few glyphs at a time - the more glyphs are selected, the more likely it is that more than one word will be returned from the search.
You can install it via the plugin manager under Wordfinder:
From the font view a new tab with word(s) containing all selected glyphs is opened:
In the tab view word(s) containing all selected glyphs are appended to the end. You can also repeat several times and quite likely will get a couple of different words with the same glyph:
The plugin comes with a large dictionary (+300k words, which the plugin processes for matches in under a second - even faster on consecutive uses) and should provide decent script support for many scripts. You can also set a custom parameter to a folder on your computer where the plugin should read text from (all files in the directory are scanned) — this can be faster for less words and the words may more ideal for your font (more words with rare glyphs, etc). Scanned words are also used in different UPPERCASE, lowercase, TitleCase transforms to expand the range of available matches.
I’ve tested this mostly with Latin and Cyrillic scripts and preferably used my own dictionaries, so I am very curious to hear how the default word list performs for your uses.
I installed it (dumped the glyphs-plugin-wordfinder-1.0.0 directory into the plugins directory) and it shows up in the Glyph menu. Nothing happens when I try to run it. I tested on Glyphs 1141 and 1165. This shows up in the console:
Log message from “Wordfinder”:
<type ‘exceptions.OSError’>
I think the output should be more generous. One word feels casual.
It should show the selected glyph in as many contexts as possible – if it’s an uppercase letter then show an example of the letter: 1. in front of the word as title case, 2. in front of the word as all uppercase, 3. in the middle of the word as all uppercase; if it’s a lowercase letter: 1. in front, 2. in the middle, 3. as a last letter in the word. 4. next to an uppercase letter, 5. maybe an example where the letter is used twice in a row would be useful too?
Thanks for the report. Small but significant oversight on my part, and as per the other responses this seems fixed now. Please uninstall and reinstall the plugin. I also tested for your Korean glyphs and am afraid those are not included in the sample dictionary (which really mostly is the declaration of human rights in various languages, parsed down to reasonable words; I expect this limits things to modern language and common glyphs, although in various scripts). You can also set your own directory from where to read words files from:
If any of you have a good (Korean) dictionary or obscure word lists that could be included in the plugin that would be awesome! Ondrej Jób’s Context of Diacritics word source is included with permission, for example, because it contains a good amount of words with not so common glyphs.
Good suggestions that also have come to my mind. Right now the plugin attempts to find words that contain all the selected glyphs, in as little words as possible.
It could be a “hidden” feature that selecting only a single glyph would give you these kind of beginning/end/middle/double/Uc/lc words.
Also note you can just select the same glyph again and most likely you will get a different word.
Maybe I’m screwing up the install. I downloaded glyphs-plugin-wordfinder-1.0.0 and put the entire directory in ~/Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Plugins, did I get that wrong? Does it have any dependencies?
Thanks for trying again and confirming it works now, glad you reported that initial problem
Let me know if you have any good resources for korean, it’s not a script I’m familiar with so its hard to judge off hand how useful the included dictionary works.
