Suggestion: dealing with transformed components

Am I missing a simple way to deal with transformed components?

Seems like it would be useful to have a “decompose on export” checkbox for the selected component, perhaps would fit among these:

image

Or just a custom parameter “Decompose transformed components”?

In what contexts would you use that?

Whenever you can make a glyph by scaling/stretching/rotating a component. Of course, it’s all font-specific, but there are cases when a mere mechanical transformation is enough:

• endash > emdash
• period > bullet
• period > ellipsis
• paren > paren.case
• dotaccent > dieresis
• accents > accents.case
• accents > accents.narrow
• Ľ ľ and ť sometimes may need a subtle scaling of the accent
• comma > quote marks
• geometric shapes and modular fonts

But why do you need them decomposed?

Because transformed components don’t seem to be well supported in variable fonts (especially, if there are different transformations in different masters)

That will be dealt with automatically in the next version.

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