Simple axes order change?

Hi! I was wondering whether changing axes order could be simplified? Just a thought on reducing some manual labor.

Axes order choice seems like a post-design process, especially for complex and experimental 3+ axes systems, rather than a pre-design set up. Especially now, when we deal with unusual variable fonts more and more.

At the moment, changing axes order means not only manually swapping the values for every master and instance, but also for every bracket/brace layer, which might be a lot of work. Could all of those values just swap automatically? Maybe as a checkbox option?
Or is there a way to do that already?

PS
Since forum is all about user’s complains and nitpicking, just wanted to randomly say thanks a lot to the team for the great tool!

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The current implementation makes it very difficult. I’m working on improving this.

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Do you want to swap axis order for the end user, e.g. for getting menu ordering right in Adobe apps? If so, then consider keeping the order in the file and adding an AxisOrdering attribute to the AxisRecord of each axis in the STAT table. That would be done post-export with fonttools/ttx or OTM.

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I also need to change the order of axes, but can’t see a way to do it. Basically want to drag the list of axes in the same way we can drag the masters into a different order.

In this particular project we started with the parametric axes, and only now are we adding the user axes. The parametric axes will be hidden by default, but when they’re shown, they should appear after, not before, the user axes. I imagine this would be a common approach when making fonts with parametric and user axes.

I’m quite late for this conversation, but I’d like to let you know I have a script that does just that:

Just drag and drop the axes in this window. It will reorder the axes in masters, instances and special layers.

It is called Reorder Axes and it’s available on my GitHub repo. Look for Harbortype Scripts on the Plugin Manager if you’re in Glyphs 3 or download them manually if you’re in Glyphs 2 at https://github.com/harbortype/glyphs-scripts.

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I added dragging for the axes in Font Info. Thanks for the reminder.

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Awesome, thank you both! :smiley: