Need help with Glyphs style linking.

Eimantas Paškonis

I've linked Bold to Regular and it works.
I also need to link SemiBold to Light. And that doesn't work. Instead of Semi, it turns on Bold. When disabled, it then gives back Regular instead of Light.

Tested on TextEdit and Pages in OSX.

Ermin Međedović

Glyphs forum maybe?

Eimantas Paškonis

Posted there earlier.

John Hudson

To style link your semibold to your light you must make the latter the nominal regular style of a separate family. So you would have something like this, indicating family and full name settings (the indication in square brackets is of the actual design, not part of the naming):

MyFont
-MyFont Regular [regular design]
-MyFont Bold [bold design]

MyFont Light
-MyFont Light Regular [light design]
-MyFont Light Bold [semibold design]

In order to display both families as a single family in e.g. InDesign, you need to set appropriate Preferred Family and Preferred Subfamily names.

I don't use Glyphs, so cannot advise on how to set this information in that tool.

Mark Simonson

It's probably not the fault of your fonts. The Cocoa text engine (used by TextEdit and Pages) does not really recognize such style linking. It uses some kind of heuristic based on style names instead. Try it with any other font you have installed that has more than two weights. Clicking repeatedly on the "B" button or doing command-B repeatedly will eventually result in toggling between the regular and bold styles of the font family, no matter what weight you start with.

Mark Simonson

Other apps on the Mac like InDesign, QuarkXPress and MS Word will recognize the links set up as John suggests.

Jeff Kellem

Minor note: Apple's Pages does not use the Cocoa text engine [according to an Apple engineer]; they implemented their own, separately, unfortunately. So, TextEdit has better OpenType support than Pages, oddly enough.

Mark Simonson

Well, that's something I hadn't noticed before. Interestingly, it still doesn't follow the style mapping in the font, but instead of the behavior I described above, it does this (usually):

- If you select a style that it doesn't consider to be "bold" (e.g., Thin, Light, Regular), the "B" button toggles between that style and whatever is called "Bold" in the family.
- If you start from a style that it considers "bold" (e.g., Semibold, Bold, Extrabold, Black), it toggles between that and the "regular" weight.

Eimantas Paškonis

So yes, it works in InDesign. Before I test in Bootcamp with WordPad - will it work in Windows too?

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

Eimantas: you can use the styleMapFamilyName parameter for what John described above.