Glyphr - a new and free font editor

Vasil Stanev

https://www.glyphrstudio.com/
Your thoughts?

Christian Thalmann

I can't judge the quality of the editor, but the logo and sample font on the website look very «Dafont». The website also suggests questionable practices like using the ligature feature to make «Æ».

I find the name «Glyphr» very unfortunate. It's literally only one ASCII unit away from «Glyphs». It would only be respectful to give established brand names some breathing space.

Khaled Hosny

Christian Thalmann said:

I can't judge the quality of the editor, but the logo and sample font on the website look very «Dafont». The website also suggests questionable practices like using the ligature feature to make «Æ».

Glyphs has a tutorial that suggests calt for turning ß into ẞ in uppercase text.

I find the name «Glyphr» very unfortunate. It's literally only one ASCII unit away from «Glyphs». It would only be respectful to give established brand names some breathing space.

I couldn’t find the date of the first Glyphs release, but the first Glyphr release is from 2014, and I think it would be hard to argue that Glyphs was an “established brand name” back then.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Plus "glyph" is just a noun. Let's not get all Taylor Swift here...

But that logo, yeah...

George Thomas

I think it would be hard to argue that Glyphs was an “established brand name” back then.

I disagree with that assessment; Glyphs was first announced in 2009:
"Flexible font editor by Berlin-based Georg Seifert, announced at ATypI 2009 in Mexico City."* and by 2013 many people were beginning to switch to it.

From 2012:
http://typedrawers.com/discussion/39/thoughts-on-glyphs-font-editor/p1

*Devroye

Christian Thalmann

Khaled Hosny said:

Glyphs has a tutorial that suggests calt for turning ß into ẞ in uppercase text.

No, it turns /ß/ into a /ß.calt/ that looks like a /ẞ/. This the behavior the user wants (I can't think of a plausible counterexample), whereas I expect most people don't want /A/E/ to turn into /AE/ automatically unless the font is super decorative.

Good to know that Glyphr is several years old already, though; I erroneously assumed it was a new release.

Khaled Hosny

Mixed case is a thing (in English at least). Anyway, it is been considered a bad practice for a long time now to use OpenType features to convert glyphs of encoded characters to glyphs of other encoded characters, because it then makes the nature of the underlying text fuzzy, be it ẞ or Æ.

Claudio Piccinini

Christian Thalmann said:

I can't judge the quality of the editor, but the logo and sample font on the website look very «Dafont». The website also suggests questionable practices like using the ligature feature to make «Æ».

I find the name «Glyphr» very unfortunate. It's literally only one ASCII unit away from «Glyphs». It would only be respectful to give established brand names some breathing space.

That logo hurts the eyes. That is enough for me, if they mean to offer a type design editor, to skip it.

Vasil Stanev

What bothers me more than the logo is that it warned me about opening a font with more than 100 glyphs.

George Thomas

I like to know who I am dealing with. Does anyone know who is behind the editor? They are hiding behind a proxy.

Vasil Stanev

This is getting stranger.

I hope the creators find this thread and clear things up. the type world is not that enormous, IMPO.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Christian Thalmann

Vasil Stanev said:

What bothers me more than the logo is that it warned me about opening a font with more than 100 glyphs.

Whoa, that's alarming.

Simon Cozens

George Thomas said:

I like to know who I am dealing with. Does anyone know who is behind the editor? They are hiding behind a proxy.

It's not clear on the web site at all but it's easy to find on GitHub: Matthew LaGrandeur, apparently.

Theunis de Jong

... made for font design hobbyists

seems a reasonable explanation of some of the remarks made above. However, I spot some rather arbitrary limitations:

Kerning gets glyphs together and feelin' good.

True but exporting this kerning is only supported in the SVG format, not to OTF.

Unicode-a-palooza - Easily select some common Unicode character ranges to design, or input arbitrary ranges - up to U+FFFF. That's 65k glyphs of excitement.

This overlooks the additional 65K of (mainly) Unicode Emoji, surely an important feature for the target (hobbyist) audience.

OTOH:

Components - Define a shape once, like an 'o', and re-use it across many glyphs, like 'bdgpq'. Make changes to the Root Component, and it updates all the glyphs linked to it.

Now that is a nice thing to have. It sounds different from the standard "component glyphs" to create accented characters.

There is nothing to disparage such a project. Creating fonts out of nothing -- or, indeed, importing an existing font with all of its features intact -- is a tall task, and wrapping up an editor in HTML and Javascript is quite a feat. It surely is enough to entice its target audience -- the dabblers and the curious -- to have a go at creating a few glyphs, and it introduces them to a set of important basic concepts such as outlines, Unicode codepoints, and the eclectic set of "current" font types.

An interested user will run into its current limits quite fast, and will then have to decide whether to plough on nevertheless, invest a ****load of time installing and trying to run the otherwise free FontForge, or take a plunge and spend actual hard $$$ on one of the real expensive, professional-level font editors.

Kent Lew

Components - Define a shape once, like an 'o', and re-use it across many glyphs, like 'bdgpq'. Make changes to the Root Component, and it updates all the glyphs linked to it.

Now that is a nice thing to have. It sounds different from the standard "component glyphs" to create accented characters.

Theunis — FontLab VI offers similar functionality. They call them Elements and Element References, I believe.

Christian Thalmann

Theunis de Jong said:

Components - Define a shape once, like an 'o', and re-use it across many glyphs, like 'bdgpq'. Make changes to the Root Component, and it updates all the glyphs linked to it.

Now that is a nice thing to have. It sounds different from the standard "component glyphs" to create accented characters.

Outside of some very exotic typeface designs (made out of disjoint pieces, perhaps?), using /o/ as a component for stemmed glyphs is a spectacularly bad idea.

There is nothing to disparage such a project.

It's true that I would have loved an editor like that back when I was taking my first steps in font design, and struggling to make FontForge work. I suspect getting comfortable in its extremely limited scope would have held back my learning curve, though.

or take a plunge and spend actual hard $$$ on one of the real expensive, professional-level font editors.

Glyphs Mini is $40.—.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Christian Thalmann said:

Glyphs Mini is $40.—.

Ah, but the computer it requires...

Christian Thalmann

Kent Lew said:

Components - Define a shape once, like an 'o', and re-use it across many glyphs, like 'bdgpq'. Make changes to the Root Component, and it updates all the glyphs linked to it.

Now that is a nice thing to have. It sounds different from the standard "component glyphs" to create accented characters.

Theunis — FontLab VI offers similar functionality. They call them Elements and Element References, I believe.

(For the record, you can of course use any glyph as a component in any other glyph in Glyphs. There's even support for glyph parts (such as corners and serifs) as components, though I've never tried that myself.)

Ray Larabie

I tried an earlier version of Glyphr and I can see it's been improved. I don't think it would be possible for me to make a font with this tool because it's lacking essential vector controls. It has to at least have what a mid 1990s Fontographer had to make fonts with it. At least for me; that's the minimum. And it's not forced integers so it's an instant pass based on that alone.