Previewing combined and predesigned accents

Glyphs
1

Glyphs Version 2.5.2 (1181). I tried to make a font with combined accents, following your tutorial.

Now when I try to test it in Glyphs by pasting in something like “HÔTEL”, it shows me /O first and circumflex next to /O. It doesn’t show them on top of each other. I’ve copied my testing texts (including “HÔTEL”) from UTF-8 text file.

Shouldn’t it show the predesigned /Ô (with 00D4 Unicode point), when this character is pasted in? I’d prefer the combining accents in previews as a secondary option. Is there a setting to change the preference for predesigned characters?

2

This sounds like you have no proper anchors set.

3

I’m pretty sure I do, see attachement.

But, if I paste in 00D4, I want to see predesigned /Ô assigned to 00D4 in the preview. I don’t want to see the combined accent!

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4

The edit view is not a full text editor (that would do automatic pre-composition of accents). Otherwise it would be difficult to edit the accent glyphs. To preview the accent position you can use the accent cloud (as seen in your screenshot) or export a font and test in Indesign (https://www.glyphsapp.com/tutorials/testing-your-fonts-in-adobe-apps) or out with TextPreview app (https://glyphsapp.com/tools/textpreview).

5

I’m not talking about automatic accent pre-composition in edit view.

Anyway I think I found the problem. For some reason, my text file is in UTF-8-Mac format and so contains the combining accents. I found out that I have to convert the text to UTF-8 format:

iconv -f utf-8-mac -t utf-8 Input.txt >Output.txt

Maybe there is a better way to handle this? Sucks that Textedit file saving doesn’t differentiate between UTF-8-Mac and UTF-8.

6

I don’t think that this is a Mac specific problem. If the text stores composed or decomposed accents has to do with the input. Some apps either compose or decomposed everything but they should leave the underlying text untouched.