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Easy oblique
Now that you’ve finished the upright of your font, you’re confronted with a severe case of italic angst. An easy way out is an oblique. But in fact, even in a real italic, the caps and small caps will...
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Contextual kerning
Glyphs offers a smart way to add your own contextual kerning in a separate OpenType feature. Warning: rather advanced level.So, you have optimized the sidebearings of your glyphs, then added kerning...
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Localize your font: Catalan punt volat
In Catalonia, you will sometimes see a dot in mid air between two L’s. Here is why, and how to implement it in your font.Catalans type L·L (L–periodcentered–L) when they mean to type a punt volat...
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Reusing shapes: corner components
Corner components are pretty much like magic for creating serifs. And not only serifs.Corner components are shapelets you can attach to corner nodes. Perfect for serifs, they also lend themselves for...
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Naming
Font names are important because they determine font menu grouping and ordering, which is crucial for the way your fonts will appear to your users. Naming your font family can be a little tricky, so...
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Kerning
Changing the whitespace enclosed inside a pair of glyphs is called kerning. Here’s how to do it in Glyphs, with lots of good tips to make your task easy.Kerning is usually something you do very late in...
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Creating a variable font
Variable fonts open a whole new world of possibilities. Creating them is a breeze in Glyphs.What are variable fonts? If you have not read John Hudson’s excellent introductory article, stop right now...
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Vertical metrics
Vertical metrics determine the first baseline in a text, the distance between lines of text, and the padding to the following object below the last baseline.For historical reasons, there are no less...
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Make your font work in Windows
Have you also been trying to fix Windows with your font? Welcome to the club.When you produce fonts, there are typically three environments you care about: web browsers, Adobe apps, and Windows. Or...
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Creating an Arabic font
Been looking for a quick and easy introduction to Arabic in Glyphs? This is it.Set up your document When you start Glyphs, you will be either greeted by the Start Window, or you can bring it up any...
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Intermediate layers
Intermediate layers help you fine-tune interpolations for individual glyphs.Intermediate layers a.k.a. brace layers are pretty powerful. They allow you to fine-tune interpolations for individual...
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Alternating glyph shapes: the bracket trick in Glyphs 2
In Glyphs 2, sometimes you will need two different forms of a glyph. The bracket trick will help you alternate glyph shapes. Attention: For Glyphs 3, read Switching Shapes instead.A common example is...
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Additional masters for individual glyphs: the brace trick in Glyphs 2
Sometimes you need an extra master, but just for a glyph, not for the whole font. Here is how you do it in Glyphs 2.For interpolation, two-master setups work surprisingly well. Well, except that...
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Diacritics
You would like to know how to build letters with accents, umlauts, tildes and what have you? Super easy, I promise.Okay, say you already finished your lowercase letters from a to z. Now think, for...
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Creating fonts with complex outlines
Grunge fonts, handwriting fonts, dirty letterpress fonts: if your font is complex, this tutorial is for you.Modern font technology is primarily geared towards ‘normal’ typefaces. That means that some...
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Stylistic sets
You have more than one design that you like for the same letter? Put them into a stylistic set!Let’s say you cannot decide on the shape of your a, or you worked out two variations and you want to keep...
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Scripting Glyphs, part 3
So, now that we’ve understood the object model, we can go on to extend our Scripts menu with our own scripts.This tutorial assumes you have read Scripting Glyphs, part 1 and Scripting Glyphs, part 2...
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Easy oblique
Now that you’ve finished the upright of your font, you’re confronted with a severe case of italic angst. An easy way out is an oblique. But in fact, even in a real italic, the caps and small caps will...
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Extending Glyphs
It is easy to extend Glyphs: tap into the realm of existing scripts and plug-ins, or even write your own extension. It’s easier than you may think.Basically there are two ways of extending the...
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Writing plug-ins
Plug-ins offer additional features to software applications, usually provided by third parties. This overview covers plug-in development for Glyphs 2.3 or later. Don’t be shy, grab a cup of great...
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