Selecting/Editing Brace Layers across multiple Glyphs if they have the same name/values

Glyphs
1

Hi there,

I find it still a super tedious workflow to implement brace layers across multiple glyphs. It would be really an immense improvement to implement the following behaviour.

  1. Show/Select Special Layers that have the exact same name across the selection of Glyphs
  • Currently its only showing the main masters:
    Special-Layer-Selected__Multiple-Glyphs-Selected
  1. When cycling through Glyphs (fn + shift + <-/->) stay in the same special layer (if the prev/next glyph has the exact same layer)
  • Currently it just keeps the one you selected in the original glyph but goes back to the master for the next/previous glyph:
    Special-Layer-Selected__Next-Prev-Glyph

I really would love to especially add some nice extra axes for my variable fonts but things like this make it way too annoying / time consuming.

If anyone has a script that does at least the second one (prev/next glyphs) it would be very very much appreciated. Especially that one would be really helpful for me.

best,
Manuel

2

Try this script, which switches to the next (or previous) layer in the selected glyphs in a tab. It uses the layers of the first selected glyph, and matches the other glyphs to it when possible:
Next Layer in Selection.py

1 Like
3

Thanks Alex. That completely solved the first issue for me and for the second I combined your code with the “Edit Next Glyph” (Freemix) by Tim Ahrens, which works pretty great actually.

Though I would also like to combine it with the native next/prev glyph function. @GeorgSeifert
could you maybe provide the the code for for prev/next glyph (fn + shift + <-/->)?

4

But what do you expect to happen if the next glyph doesn’t have that layer, won’t it just reset to master anyway?

5

yes. that’s what I would expect. going back to the main master layer of that special layer. Even better would be to go to the next special layer under the same master, if there is. So I expect, that if you are in a special layer and go to the next glyphs it is the most obvious that you are focused on editing special layers and not the main masters.

However, it doesn’t make much sense if you use it with the regular order of Glyphs. But if I work on special layers, I either have at least a smart filter only showing glyphs with special layers, or a custom list with the special layer glyphs ordered by shapes/similarity.