Newbie confusion: how to preview text?

Hi there. I’m sure this is an idiot question. I’m new to the app. I just want to look at multiple chars (text) I type to check relative spacing and weight. I assume the “text preview” window is for this, but the top of the window is a dropdown with nothing in it, and there’s a search box (?) that doesn’t seem to do anything, and I can type into the window which seems to work for the glyphs I’ve already drafted but the size is super tiny and it’s not helpful. What is going on in this window and how do I use it? Thanks.

(FWIW, I’m coming from some experience with RoboFont, which has that spacing preview window for this purpose. Is there an equivalent?)

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(also the Text Preview window doesn’t seem to update with changes I make to a glyph immediately? Am I barking up the wrong tree for this?)

You can edit multiple glyphs next to each other – in context. Use the text tool (shortcut T or the “T” symbol in the toolbar in the center top of the window) to type multiple glyphs. You can also insert glyphs by their name: Press Command-F or select from the menu EditFindFind…, type the name of a glyph, and confirm with Return.

This is what multiple glyphs in the edit view look like:

Double-click a glyph to edit it. Alternatively, when using the text tool mentioned above, navigate using the arrow keys such that the cursor is placed before the glyph you want to edit and then press the Escape key to switch back to editing.

You can preview glyphs without the noise of nodes and metrics and such by clicking on the eye icon in the bottom left corner of the window:

Resize the preview by dragging its top edge up and down.

Select WindowPreview Panel to get the same view but as a separate window:

You can learn more in the edit view tutorial.

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In Glyphs, the edit view is the spacing view. See the spacing tutorial for more.

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Excellent. Thank you for the detailed and specific info, Florian.

FWIW the spacing tutorial includes a lot of great info… but as far as I can tell doesn’t talk about entering the multi-glyph mode as you just explained :slight_smile:

You can find more infos on that in the edit view tutorial linked above.

And there Text Preview panel needs to have at least one instance in the Exports settings.

How can I set the line height in the Text Preview window? In my current design, it’s extremely large, about 200%. Why is that? I tried changing Edit View Line Height, Preview Ascender and Preview Descender but they don’t seem to have any effect on the Text Preview.

Possibly this issue in the new cutting edge release? It already resolved in the upcoming version.

Thanks, that’s good to know. I just checked in Glyphs 3091 and indeed, the line height is smaller (feels normal). Still, the question is how to control the line height. I think that’s crucial for a paragraph preview.

The Text Preview is generally still a bit unstable, isn’t it? I am sometimes getting crashes, it always shows the first master (even if I select something else from the list), typed-in characters are smaller than the others, and it doesn’t update edits to the glyphs. Looking forward to seeing this working, though!

It can only show instances. It will default to the first master as instance if none are set.

Hmm. It does update edits for me with a short delay. Do you still have that issue in the latest build?

Can you send me the file you experience the crashes?