NineBoxView Pro – Nine-grid Preview Tool for CJK Font Design

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Hi everyone,

I’d like to share NineBoxView Pro, a nine-grid preview plugin I’ve been developing for Glyphs 3. It started as a personal tool to solve my daily workflow challenges, and I’ve now refined it into a Pro version that I hope will be useful to others working on CJK fonts.

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The Problem

When designing CJK fonts, we constantly need to check how the current glyph looks alongside other characters. Testing different combinations typically involves:

  • Manually typing test strings over and over
  • Losing track of which combinations you’ve already checked
  • Difficulty reproducing specific problem pairings

This becomes especially tedious when trying to spot spacing issues or stylistic inconsistencies across thousands of characters.

The Solution: Three-layer Preview System

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NineBoxView Pro addresses this with a three-layer approach:

Reference Characters — Enter your frequently-used test characters. They automatically fill the surrounding cells in randomized order. Click to reshuffle and discover problematic combinations you might have missed.

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Locked Characters — Pin specific characters to fixed positions in the grid. Perfect for testing a glyph against known difficult neighbors (e.g., checking 「永」 next to various radicals).

Presets — Save and name your reference/locked configurations. Switch between different testing contexts with one click—handy when working on different scripts or checking specific design elements.

Reference and locked characters are stored within your .glyphs file for seamless team collaboration. Presets are stored system-wide and include import/export functionality for sharing across machines.

Additional Features

  • Native macOS experience — Drag & drop, character picker integration, 60fps rendering
  • Light Table sync — Hold Shift to compare your current glyph with previous git versions of the same glyph
  • Grid helpers — Display bounding box, center lines, and custom guides
  • Five-language interface — English, 繁體中文, 简体中文, 日本語, 한국어

Privacy

All data stays local. Nothing is uploaded to the cloud.

Links

The plugin offers a 14-day free trial and is available through the Glyphs Plugin Manager.

I’d love to hear your feedback, feature requests, or bug reports. Happy type designing!

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