Hi,
Why we don’t have an outliner like robofont has? Or rather will have.
I would fund that on Kickstarter.
ooooh. yes please!
Yes! Would be nice!
Exactly which functionality are you missing? You can offset paths, round corners, and rotate glyphs back and forth already in Glyphs.
The thickness, contrast, angle, and cap stuff would be nice to have in Glyphs. Basically, tools for tracing over hand-lettered stuff like I would in Illustrator, but without having to use Adobe’s vulgar turd of an application.
"All in One" plugin that shows change of parameters like contrast, angle etc.
In my opinion this would be a great tool that could bring more users to Glyphs. My first thought when, I saw this in robofont, was I must have it…
As far as I can see it the current implementation lacks the contrast angel and the end caps, doesn’t it?
DTF
There is a Trace plugin as a separate download.
I’m also very interested in adding a good path tracer into Glyphs. I don’t think the offset paths function in Glyphs is an acceptable solution; it yields wonky strokes.
@ Rainer, what’s DTF?
Can you give some examples of wonky results?
If you have set all extremes and no inflections, it should work.
cthalmann; DTF is a forum member
“There is a Trace plugin as a separate download.”
It is much faster to just draw strokes over drawings than it is to auto-trace and clean up.
DTF, cthalmann
Are you using the Offset filter to semi-manually trace a scan? Or can you quickly describe your workflow?
cthalmann
Apart from extremum points, inflection points (can be added with shift-click) are necessary for the offset calculations, e.g. in an s-spine. We tried improving the algorithm for double inflections without a node at the inflection point, but by their very nature, cubic splines become too imprecise in such situations.
@mekkablue: My “workflow” is described in my separate thread, “Stroking for Path-Based Fonts?”.
@Georg: I’ve shown examples before, but apparently they’ve falled prey to my FTP space’s housekeeping. I’ve made a new example:
ftp://ftp.mpia.de/pub/thalmann/type/wonky.png
ftp://ftp.mpia.de/pub/thalmann/type/handles.png
The extrema are set, and there are no inflection points. Yet the join at the bottom is wonky. The problem, I believe, is that the code attempts to draw the expanded outline with as many points as the original path had. However, that becomes impossible if the curvature radius of the path becomes comparable to the pen size. I suspect the wonkyness persists even for more mildly curved paths, it just gets harder to pin down.
If I understand that right, you explained it with this picture, which, unfortunately, does not load anymore.
Correct. Hence the new pictures!
Are you using the Offset filter to semi-manually trace a scan? Or can you quickly describe your workflow?
When I trace a scan in Glyphs I draw all of the paths manually. If I do it in illustrator I just draw one path and then use calligraphic brushes and/or the taper tool to match the shapes and then convert the shape to a path. I only do this for calligraphic stuff