Smart components from regular glyphs

Glyphs
1

Lets say I have a variable font with weight and width axes. Now I want to add a superscript glyph, lets say superscript 2. I’m making it a components from regular two and scaling it down, but of course now it is too thin. I want to fix this by making it bolder and may be a little wider.

Smart components look like a good fit for this, but I need to duplicate the two glyph as a smart glyph, and duplicate all masters as layers in each master, which is tedious (I need to do this for tens of glyphs), and losses all the benefits of using components in the first place (as I now need to update all the smart glyphs if the corresponding regular glyphs changed).

So, my question, is there a way to have a smart component using the global font variations not the manually setup smart glyph ones?

2

Check out the TypeNurse script (available in the Plugin Manager, I think) called Make Component Smart. You need to select the component that you want to make smart (as in, run it with the component selected, not in the glyph you are using as a component). It will add the current font axes as the smart component axes.

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3

Thanks, that is quite helpful.

I’m getting mixed results, though, some components are interpolating nicely and others are behaving erratically. I’ll need to set down and try to isolate some of the bad cases and try to figure what is going on.

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