Placeholders and Kerning

Hey, all,

I’ve been using Glyphs for about five years now and in all this time, I’ve mastered lots and lots of things, but I am still completely bewildered by placeholders.

They seem to me to be most helpful for the kerning of letters, but in order to kern a pair, for example, you have to put your cursor between the two characters you want to pair, and then your placeholder changes.

Am I missing something simple here?

Julie

Spacing yes, kerning no.

The placeholders are meant to show the current glyph in a different context. So you can do ‘nnxnn oo/placeholder/oo’. When you place the cursor in front of the x, the placeholder will show the x. So, as Rainer said, it is more useful for spacing than kerning.

I use it for kerning. But to create “another context”.

For example:
nna/placeholder/nn
ooaaoo
llll/a/placeholder/llll

So if you put your cursor left of the fat /a, you can go through all glyphs and you will see the combinations “a/glyph” in all rows.

Then swap the left a’s in all three lines to the next glyph you want to kern. Etc. etc.

1 Like

Or just try out the Kernkraft plugin :slight_smile:
Also a little starting guide here.

(Note: I recently received some minor reports of misbehaving, those are probably due to some changes in the GlyphsApp API. If you encounter some, please report. The more reports, the more I’m motivated to work on it and fix the problems. Since it’s open source, it’s not too easy to invest valuable time if no one cares anyway =) )

1 Like

Mark, you would be wrong about that.