SILE Plugin: Opinions from designers please

+1! I’d love being use Harfbuzz for testing non-Latin scripts in Glyphs. It would save me from having to edit HTML files to see how fonts work in Chrome and Firefox.

OK. I think this is ready for people to play with - consider it an alpha version. (That means it works for me, but don’t be surprised if it crashes, or doesn’t work at all, or…)

Download the plugin from http://dealer.simon-cozens.org/~simon/glyphsile.zip , unzip and double-click to install into Glyphs. It should give you a “SILE Preview” option in the Window menu. (and a Lua console option, but don’t worry about that.) If you open that, type some text into the bottom part of the window that appears, select a “behavior” (Master/Instance) and press draw, it should typeset your text.

Instances use Harfbuzz for positioning and everything else, whereas Masters only uses Harfbuzz for glyph substitution, so you will get more accurate results out of the Instances, but the Masters will be quicker to update. It will also auto-update when you focus the window, so you can get near-realtime feedback as you edit.

Please let me know how it goes. Or doesn’t, as the case may be.

The link is broken.

Buh. Should be fixed now.

Installed the plugin, but it’s not showing any extra options in the Window menu. I’m on 2.2.1 build 819.

Same here. :,(

OK, that tells me it’s not loading the libraries it needs. Could you (1) close Glyphs, (2) open the Console app (in Applications/Utilities), (3) reopen Glyphs, and tell me what new messages pop up in the Console window.

Yep.

28/10/2015 09:25:29.598 Glyphs[24638]: Problem with Plugin at Path: /Users/cosimolupo/Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Plugins/GlyphSILE.glyphsPlugin

actually this message is more informative:

28/10/2015 09:25:29.598 Glyphs[24638]: Error loading /Users/cosimolupo/Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Plugins/GlyphSILE.glyphsPlugin/Contents/MacOS/GlyphSILE:  dlopen(/Users/cosimolupo/Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Plugins/GlyphSILE.glyphsPlugin/Contents/MacOS/GlyphSILE, 265): Symbol not found: ___NSArray0__
  Referenced from: /Users/cosimolupo/Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Plugins/GlyphSILE.glyphsPlugin/Contents/MacOS/GlyphSILE (which was built for Mac OS X 10.11)
  Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation
 in /Users/cosimolupo/Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Plugins/GlyphSILE.glyphsPlugin/Contents/MacOS/GlyphSILE

I am on OS X 10.10, btw.

OK, that wasn’t even close to the error I was expecting. Please try deleting the plugin (Library/Application Support/Glyphs/Plugins/GlyphSILE.glyphsPlugin directory) and downloading and installing this one instead:
http://dealer.simon-cozens.org/~simon/glyphsile-build2.zip

I don’t know if it will help - it might. Thanks for your patience and the detailed reporting; we may need a few go-arounds like this to get it working for everyone…

It’s working now! Thanks! :smiley:

Oh. That was easy.

OK, future builds will now be available from the GlyphSILE web site, which is really where I should have put this in the first place:

1 Like

Thanks Simon. I will use Github’s issue tracker to send bug reports or feature suggestions.

As for when it should update:
I have a writing app (Scrivener) that auto-saves, and cleverly the autosave is automatically triggered after 2 or 3 seconds of inaction. In other words, it isn’t re-saving while you’re right in the midst of writing, but only once you’ve paused. Could a similar strategy be useful here?