Unicode code points and glyph names

Glyphs
1

When trying to add some characters from the Unicode Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement (U+1F100 through U+1F1FF) to a font, I’ve noticed some awkward problems.

First of all, when adding these glyphs as uni1F130, uni1F131 etc., the Unicode code point doesn’t get set for the character — uni1F130 is used as the glyph name, but the code point doesn’t automatically become 1F130 as I kind of expected it would.

Second, after adding the code point manually via ⌥⌘i, changing the glyph name to something more readable (like squareA) deletes the code point again. As a result, you can’t rename such glyphs without having to re-add the code point manually every time, which gets annoying real quick if you change your mind about the names. Especially since you can’t copy-and-paste the beginning (1F13) into the Unicode text field and then type the last number, because this is a token field rather than a simple text field.

2

Five-digit Unicode values take a u prefix, so the name would be u1F130.

The name changing works for PUA. If you want to do this for non-PUA, it is tricky because the name determines the glyph info. You could temporarily disable the name binding with the option Font Info > Other, or better yet, define your own GlyphData, just for the parts that you intend to have different. That has the added advantage that you can reuse the renaming for other projects.

3

Aha, I didn’t know that. Is there a reason for this behaviour that’s likely to confuse users?

But trying it just now, creating a glyph named u1f100 does not assign it code point 1f100.

That creates a problem I’ve run into before: How to know which name Glyphs expects for a given character or code point?

4

It’s a long standing convention, existed long before Glyphs. When you read glyph names and they start with u, you know that you need to read 5 characters more.

There are many ways. Get them from the glyph lists in the sidebar, or look it up in Window > Glyph Info. Or type the Unicode names in Glyph > Add Glyphs or the name field of a glyph and the app converts it, or type the character and the app converts it. There’s a tutorial called Get Your Glyph Names Right with more info.

The name u1F100 should auto convert. Note that the hex numbers A-F are typed in uppercase.

1 Like
5

TIL :slight_smile: Still, IMHO it would make sense to also support uni1F123 as well as:—

That’s where I went wrong in my test this morning: I tried u1f100 instead of u1F100. Which points out an inconsistency, because if you enter 1f100 in the Unicode field of the glyph info window, it does recognise it as a hex number, but it doesn’t when adding glyphs to the font. (As an aside, talking of that window: it has a blue button that doesn’t respond to a press of the Return key — not even when it has the focus.)

6

I’ll have a look at the lower case name.
The “add glyphs” dialog responds to Cmd+enter/return.

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7

Technically, one is a case-sensitive glyph name, the other is a number. But Glyphs could autocorrect the input.

The uniXXXX vs. uXXXXX thing is a convention that predates Glyphs. Not sure how to autocorrect that because uni12345 could be a misspelled uni1234 or a misspelled u12345.

1 Like