I have a need to create a set of numbers in round bullets (and other shapes) and am wondering how to do this for text containing multiple characters. I assume it’s some kind ligature, but am not familiar enough with the process to know!
This won’t be possible in Glyphs Mini, since you require OpenType features to access/build these ligatures.
You can add glyphs called one.circled, two.circled and so on, even one_zero.circled, seven_six.circled etc., but you’ll have to have these each as glyphs in the font. Ligatures would be far more efficient, but require the full version of Glyphs.
The suffix for filled circled numbers is .blackCircled.
There are some circled numbers (0–20) encoded in unicode (so you could copy paste them as plain text). But that only covers those twenty numbers. If that would be enough, you could do it in Glyphs Mini. If you need more, you need OpenType and Glyphs 3.
And that would be done by adding glyphs like “one.blackCircled, two.blackCircled, … nine.blackCircled” and then a left variant and a right variant of each (“one.blackCircled.left, one.blackCircled.right”). Those left and right glyphs can then be used to type all combinations from 11–99.
Then you need to decide how to trigger the substitutions. It could be a stylistic set.