I’m just in the process of switching to Glyphs from FontForge. Since Glyphs can’t read FontForge’s native format, I’m exporting my older fonts to OTF and importing them into Glyphs from there. I’m meeting two problems:
(1) One related pair of fonts just fails to open in Glyphs. I have no idea why. The error message is simply ‘The document “XYZ.otf” could not be opened.’ Any idea what the problem could be? All my other fonts open without error messages. The only difference I can think of right now is that the fonts in questions have small caps and my other fonts don’t.
(2) One of my fonts has been kerned with iKern. However, after importing into Glyphs, some of the kerning seems to be lost. For instance, |To| is no longer kerned. I’m wondering whether Glyphs might have read in the letter-pair kerning table only, and disregarded the class-based kerning table?
For the record, all the OTF files in question work nicely (including kerning and ligatures) when I install them on my Mac.
I’m currently using the Demo version of Glyphs, but intend to buy the full version as soon as I know that my work-in-progress fonts can be imported.
Can you send me the .otf files that cause problems?
FontForge supports .ufo. Can you try to save as .ufo and open them in Glyphs.
Glyphs supports class based kerning. I improved the import significantly in the last few days and will post a new version soon. This should also solve the other import problems.
For the record, I sent someone an OTF export of my Glyphs font, who worked on it in FontLab and sent it back in OTF. The reimport into Glyphs fails miserably (including total loss of Features, and double-clicking on a character in the overview window results in a bugged work window where I can’t type additional characters). I’ve just updated Glyphs before trying this.
I’m going to ask for an UFO file instead, but I suppose this means there is still something going wrong with the OTF import.
It is advised to use the import/export script to go back and forth to FontLab. Everything else will always result in data loose. OpenType fonts are really not a good format to interchange data. The import of .otf fonts was only meant to get you started and build a new font. Thats why there is no feature import (jet).
The disturbed edit view can mostly be “fixed” by hitting the space key. This is a strange bug that I could not fix until now.
What version do you have now? Can you send me the .otf file for testing?