Open Type Classes & Kerning

Hi,

I have a couple of questions:

I have about 2.000 glyphs in my file. A lot of alternatives. I would like to create stylistic sets for them. In FL I can create OpenType classes. Is this possible in glyphs?

Also about kerning: Is there another way to create kerning classes - other then typing by hand into each letter to which letters group they belong to? I am afraid, that this might take forever and is really prone to error if I do this with all the alternatives and the accented characters. In FL there is the drag and drop window … you know?

Thanks
Henning

You can add classes in the features pane in font info. select some glyphs in Font View and choose "copy Glyph Names" form the context menu. There is a script in my repository that helps quite a lot. And you can select several glyphs and add the classes to all of them in the Info box in the font view.
The stylistic set features are created automatically if you name the glyphs appropriately, e.g. x.ss03.

More on glyph names: http://www.glyphsapp.com/tutorials/getting-your-glyph-names-right

@ georg & mekkablue: Thanks. I will give these hints a try.

Hi, me again. Kerning and OT classes are all smoothly working now.

Would you have any advise on how to best treat underlines? In my font I have included underlines with different lengths? I have so far given them a width of 0. This looked like an easy and quick solution. But it leads to all kind of practical problems when using the font, like not being able to select that glyph. I remember having read something about this on the web some years ago, but am unable to find it right now.

I would be very thankful for any advise or help on this.
Henning

Theoretically you could do a one-to-many substitution for every glyph, replacing the glyph with itself plus the zero-width underline. That should take care of selectability. The logical place for this would be a stylistic set.

But the idea itself seems rather esoteric to me. What do your underlines look like? Unless there is something very special about them, I would not recommend investing much time into something the user will likely not expect to be implemented like this.

@ mekkablue: thanks for your answer. Its a script typeface. The underline has a kind of swash character to it. I have a few of them in different lengths. So it in that context it makes sense to me. I will give that one to many substitution idea of yours some thought.
Do you by any chance know of some typophile threads on the topic? Or some keywords I could search with?

Then, I wouldn’t do it that way, better to make “.swsh” (or perhaps “.fina”) variants of your glyphs. Cmd-Shift-G > “x+underscore=x.swsh”. Then the user can activate the swash feature, as expected.

I can understand the underscore approach as I used it myself for a script font. the one to many substitution is very fragile as it only works in Indesign if the user actives the World ready composer (that is only available in the interface since CC (or maybe in CS6, too).

World Ready Composer is selectable in CS6 and was in CS5 also although hidden from the user. I’m not sure about CS4.