Opening .ufo files with Glyphs

Glyphs
1

A question about opening .ufo files. I don’t find anything covering this in the manual.

A .ufo file Exported by Glyphs should, I think, be re-openable by Glyphs and retain all the metrics, etc. but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Is there a reason for that?

2

Can you give an example?
Or, even better, a step-by-step description on how to reproduce the problem?

3

Version 1.3.19 (483) OS X 10.8.3

  1. A font I am working on;
  2. Export as .ufo;
  3. File > Open > [filename.ufo];

Results:

  1. A Glyphs file with all the glyphs but no Metrics, Alignment Zones, etc. in Font Info panel. The UPM is present and correct.
  2. No images in Preview window; in List window all glyphs are listed along with all Width and sidebearing information.
4

Can you send me the original .glyphs file and the .ufo that had the problems?

5

Will do. Thanks.

6

UFO export choked on the alignment zones set in the .glyphs file. There were too many zones defined. Delete or reset them, and export/import works fine again.

7

Referring to my other report that I was able to resolve the .ufo export problem by commenting out all the imagePath entries, then that would appear to be a fluke. Is that correct?

Removing some zones is fine because some are temporary anyway.

Thanks.

8

For some reason, the zones you had set prevented Glyphs from producing the fontinfo file inside the UFO. And that’s where the Metrics etc. are stored. That’s why that info was lost and the display looked weird when you reopened the UFO. I haven’t done any image path tweaking, since this did the trick already.

There is a maximum number of zones. I think it was 5 top and 5 bottom zones, the fewer the better, and they must not overlap, minimum distance = 1u. Also, zones don’t make much sense without stems and hints, so you should set standard stems as well.

9

I understand about the maximum numbers, and some of those were just set up as temporary guides. I do like the Zones as guides because it is less clutter but someday perhaps my suggestion of having named guidelines could be incorporated. There isn’t any limit on guidelines.

I don’t expect this to cause me any problems in the future now that I know the cause. It is easy to work around; Glyphs is a great app.

Thanks for looking into the problem.

10

There was a bug in the .ufo saving code. It should warn about the alignment zones but failed to do so.