Is there a way to have the “edit smart glyph settings” from the context menu always available?
From my limited experimentation the option to access these settings only appears if the glyph in question has been named with a _ prefix.
Sometimes I like to make smart glyphs from normal letters and accents and I find it a bit cumbersome to add _ to their name, input the settings, then change them again.
I’m probably missing something
If a glyph has a smart component axis, the contextual menu item will be shown.
You can add an axis to selected glyphs with this script:
for layer in Font.selectedLayers:
axis = GSSmartComponentAxis()
axis.bottomValue = 0
axis.topValue = 100
axis.name = "MyAxis"
layer.parent.smartComponentAxes.append(axis)
Yeah I’ve been using something like this too, the mekkablue script “Batch Add Smart Axes”, it can even set multiple axis at once for multiple glyphs, so it’s certainly a solution…
Still feel this should be easier to access though! If it’s there for glyphs with a _ prefix in the name even when they don’t have any axes, it should just always be there.
The _ prefix is used as an indicator that it’s a component, not necessarily a smart component, and thus not exported. That’s all it’s there for (you’ll notice a glyph gets set to be non-exporting if you create it with a _ prefix). A small script to set smart component axes should be fine, since smart components are definitely not a standard use of all components.
Hi Sebastian! Yes I can kind of see the logic behind this, I guess I just don’t agree that because it is not a standard use then it should be burried away from view.
This is a handy feature but right now its pretty much completely hidden to most users.
I’ve been using it, I can script, I know where the feature is burried, this is all handled for me, but certainly not to most users.
It’s a feature that’s already built into the app, why keep it hidden behind scripting?
Just my two cents!
The “Show Smart Glyph Settings” command is supposed to edit smart glyphs. Those are typically prefixed with “_part” or “_smart” or if the subCategory is set to “Smart”. Or if the glyph has smart settings already. The last one is more a hack than a feature and not exposed to the user.
On what glyph do you like to set the smart settings?
I had a similar issue recently. I have turned my capital letters into smart glyphs so they have one extra petite caps layer per weight. So I can build at least a petite cap and an interpolated small cap from each capital letter.
If I were restricted to use separate _smart… glyphs, I would need to put a smart component into the normal capital letters as well, adding a lot of additional glyphs to the glyph set.
We are working on proper support for doing small caps and such.
Right, the command it’s supposed to edit smart glyphs, that seems perfectly reasonable.
It’s the making a glyph smart that is (in my opion) unecesarily cumbersome. If non-smart glyphs within the naming scheme can be made smart through the dialog that opens with this command, then why not do the same to whatever glyph for whatever reason?
I’ve used smart glyphs so I could for example lower the crossbar of H in Hbar, make accents narrower in narrow glyphs, I even used a C component that was narrower to build the € once…
We could very well disagree on these uses as a matter of taste, subjectivity, personal preferences… but I don’t know… you already built the feature, but you keep it siloed for _part and _smart glyphs and that’s not really necessary imho
(edited for clairty)
The hack is that you need to add a smart setting to the base glyph.
Hi Georg, I know that’s how you do it, I say so in my last message.
What I’m saying is that adding a smart setting to a base glyph is unecessarily hard: you either run a script or you change the glyph’s name just so the context menu option will appear.
If the context menu is always there, everything is easier.
A permanent context menu item implies that every glyph is a smart component, which it’s not.
For now, it’s best to rename, edit, and (perhaps) rename back. Perhaps we can add a switch to the Glyph Info dialog?
or that every glyph could be one, which they can
Yeah I’ve been doing that. The switch would be nice.
