Closed Zentheon closed 4 months ago
These are all fantastic suggestions, thank you very much for writing your ideas down and sending them in! I have some quick responses below, but overall I'll keep these in mind as v2 progresses.
Ctrl
+click either path points or shapes. But for path points especially, this can be physically difficult for points that are close together. Already implemented in Beta-1 (to be released soon) are two command buttons for "Select next/previous path point" to help cycle through adjacent path points. And, when holding down Ctrl
, it does multi-select!Your suggestions encompass a few distinct scenarios:
.txt
file in JSON format. in v2 it is also a text file in JSON format, but the extension will be .gs2
. These project files save a bunch of extra stuff I mentioned above that are useful for designing a typeface, but aren't included in the exported font file itself.Again, thank you for your ideas, let me know if you have any more!
Thanks for the reply! Seems like my browser is to blame for the node multi selection inconsistency, likely some obscure setting. I'll edit that part out!
Also for the auto width data -granted I'm no expert- I had assumed .svgs are fairly flexible and could have some sort of data tagged onto it that wouldn't effect other programs while still allowing Glyphr to recognize it. But again, only an actual concern if handling multiple glyphs at once is implemented, at which point I guess a trimmed down Glyphr save format of sorts would be a better option- which is also what I had intended with the kerning/component export idea, simply as a way to exchange that data solely within Glyphr projects.
Anyway, the data merging and reverse color concepts you mentioned sounds pretty interesting, and if I come up with anything else I'll for sure post about it!
Yeah, thanks again for the great ideas / conversation. SVG Font is a strange one just because it's been deprecated for years... so it's an established format, but we can't "depend" on programs using it. Font Forge does import/export it, so that is it's primary use case today. But, you are correct - overloading SVG Font with additional attributes would be easy, and could even be valid XML / SVG. But it's kind of a strange goal to do a lot of work to be compliant with a deprecated format 🙂
Getting to the root of the scenario, as opposed to just talking about technologies: I think the main desire here is to be able to import/export glyphs between Glyphr Studio projects, while keeping all the Glyphr Studio stuff. This is the main improvement for GSv2. Everything had to be re-architected and re-written, but GSv2 will be able to switch between projects / keep multiple projects open within a single tab, and those projects can pass data between them (this is impossible in v1).
Totally understand! It seems like other programs in the typeface designing space generally don't make special attempts at being cross-compatible anyway as from what I've gathered a lot of experienced designers discourage it. But on that note, thanks for entertaining my ideas!
I'm going to close this, as many of these ideas are either done or tracked in other issues:
I've got a fair bit of experience with Glyphr 1 and am excited for 2, though it would be awesome to see some highly missed QoL features get added to really set it apart from 1:
Mass/drag select nodes
While ctrl+click selecting multiple nodes works well by itself in Glyphr 1, having the ability to drag select nodes as well would be great compliment to it.
Glyph mass manipulation
While glyph exporting and importing in Glyphr 1 is convenient, being able to do that with multiple glyphs at once would streamline workflows a lot better. An idea for how this could work is selecting multiple glyphs from the panel with a modifier key shows a mass export option that merges the symbols into an .svg font, and then importing can read from an .svg font either from Glyphr itself or another program.
Besides I/O, it could be further used to do basic mass manipulation (Deletion, resizing, repositioning, alignment ect.)
Improved glyph imports
The current Glyphr 1 implementation of .svg imports seems to omit auto width data, which is especially a problem if mass imports were a thing.
Grids and guide colors
The grid system in Glyphr 1 one of my favorite parts of the program, but it could definitely be further improved by having individual strength integers for snapping to both lines and intersections. Besides that, and this is just more of just a nicety, having a color system in 2 that allows changing default guide colors as well as custom ones would be nice for Dark Reader users.
Kerning and component exporting
Another export/import suggestion, and pretty self-explanatory. Since Glyphr 2 is going to introduce its own save format, kerning and components (and maybe even glyphs mass exports, if more viable) could use their own extension name to make it clear what they are.
That's about all I can think of for now, most of which has come to mind from needing to swap out and manipulate a lot of glyphs at a time from a project for different variations of a font. But yeah, I'd love some input on what's actually viable with all this!