Handbook March 2017

Glyphs Mini 2
Create – Produce – Release
Affordable Font Editing for Everyone

You are reading the Glyphs Mini Handbook from March 2017
for the application version 2.0. Please download the latest
version of this handbook at:
glyphsapp.com/get-started© 2011–2017 glyphsapp.com
Written by Stella Chupik, Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer andGeorg Seifert.
Thanks to Jeff Kellem, Rob Keller, Toshi Omagari andClaus Eggers Sørensen for their invaluable input.

Contents
1
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
2
2.1
2.2
2.2.1
2.2.2
2.2.3
2.2.4
2.3
2.3.1

Glyphs 6
Glyphs Mini 6
Installation 6
Community 6
Updates 7
Keyboard Shortcuts 7
Glyphs 7
Crash Reports 7

Edit View 9
Editing Glyphs 9
Drawing Paths 9
Draw Tool 9Pencil Tool 10
Pixel Tool 10
Primitives 11
Editing Paths 12
Selecting Nodes andPaths 122.3.2 Moving Selected Nodes andPaths 122.3.3 Lasso Tool 13
2.3.4 Converting Nodes andSegments 13
2.3.5 Nodes in Alignment
Zones 142.3.6 Scaling and Rotating 14
2.3.7 Aligning 15
2.3.8 Duplicating Paths 16
2.3.9 Deleting Nodes 16
2.3.10 Opening and Closing
Paths 172.3.11 Cutting Paths 18
2.3.12 Remove Overlap 19
2.3.13 Resegmenting Outlines 19
2.3.14 Controlling Path
Direction 20
2.3.15 Extremes andInflections 20
2.3.16 Duplicate Nodes 21
2.4 Anchors 21

2.4.1 Compound and Positioning
Anchors 21
2.4.2 Ligature Carets 22
2.4.3 Adding, Editing andRemoving Anchors 23
2.4.4 Mark to Base Positioning 23
2.4.5 Mark to Mark
Positioning 24
2.5 Guidelines 24
2.5.1 Magnetic Guidelines 24
2.5.2 Local and Global
Guidelines 24
2.6 Glyph Display 26
2.6.1 Zooming 26
2.6.2 Panning 26
2.6.3 View Options 27
2.6.4 Glyph Colors 27
2.7 Background 28
2.8 Entering Text 28
2.8.1 Sample Texts 29
2.8.2 Text Tool 29
2.9 Measuring 30
2.9.1 Info Box 30
2.9.2 Measurement Tool 32
2.9.3 Measurement Guidelines 33
2.10 Images 34
2.10.1 Adding Images 34
2.10.2 Manipulating Images 35
2.11 Previewing and Testing 36
2.11.1 Previewing in macOS 36
2.11.2 Previewing in Adobe
Applications 36
2.11.3 Previewing in Web
Browsers 37
3
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.4.1

Palette 38
Palette Sidebar 38
Dimensions 38
Fit Curve 38
Transformations 38
Transformation Origin 39

3.4.2 Mirroring 39
3.4.3 Reversible
Transformations 39
3.4.4 Aligning 40
3.4.5 Boolean Operations 40
4
4.1
4.2
4.2.1
4.2.2
4.2.3
4.2.4
5
5.1
5.1.1
5.2
5.2.1
5.2.2

Filters 41
Filters Menu 41
Filters 41
Hatch Outline 41
Offset Curve 42
Round Corners 42
Transformations 43

Font View 45
Viewing Glyphs 45
Searching for Glyphs 45
Managing the Glyph Set 46
Generating New Glyphs 46
Copying Glyphs Between
Files 47
5.2.3 Removing Glyphs 47
5.3 Glyph Properties 47
5.3.1 Name 48
5.3.2 Width and Sidebearings 48
5.3.3 Kerning Groups 48
5.3.4 Export 48
5.3.5 Color Label 48
5.3.6 Unicode 49
5.4 Batch-Processing 49
5.4.1 Selecting Glyphs 49
5.4.2 Menu Commands 49
5.4.3 Batch-Renaming Glyphs 49
5.4.4 Palette Manipulations 50
5.5 Filtering and Sorting 50
5.5.1 Search Box 50
5.5.2 Private Use Area 51
5.5.3 Categories 51
5.5.4 Languages 52
5.5.5 Smart Filters 52
5.5.6 List Filters 53
5.5.7 Manage Filters 53
5.6 Names and Unicode 53

5.6.1 Glyph Info Database 53
5.6.2 Naming Glyphs 54
5.6.3 Renaming Glyphs 55
6
6.1
6.2
6.3

Font Info 56
Family and Style Names 56
Metrics 56
Stems and Alignment
Zones 57
6.4 Designer and Designer
URL 58
6.5 Manufacturer andManufacturer URL 58
6.6 Version 58
6.7 Copyright and License 58
6.8 Style Linking 59
6.9 Weight and Width 59
6.10 Grid Spacing andSubdivision 59
6.11 Units per Em 60
7
7.1
7.1.1
7.1.2

Reusing Shapes 61
Components 61
Building Compounds 61
Turning Paths into
Components 61
7.1.3 Editing Components 62
7.1.4 Moving between Base
Glyphs and Compounds 63
7.1.5 Anchors 63
7.1.6 Automatic Alignment 65
7.1.7 Locking Components 66
7.1.8 Component Colors 66
7.1.9 Decomposing 66
7.1.10 Combining Paths andComponents 66
7.1.11 Nesting Components 67
7.1.12 Preferred Marks for Glyph
Composition 67
7.1.13 Underscore Components 68
7.2
Corner and Cap
Components 68
7.2.1 Corner Components 68

7.2.2 Cap Components 70
8
8.1
8.1.1
8.1.2
8.2
8.2.1
8.2.2
8.2.3

Spacing and Kerning 72
Spacing 72
Spacing Shortcuts 72
Metric Keys 72
Kerning 73
Ways to Kern 73
Kerning Groups 74
Finding and Viewing
Kerning Pairs 74
8.2.4 Deleting Kerning Pairs 75
8.2.5 Cleaning up Kerning 75
8.2.6 Compressing Kerning 75
9
9.1
9.2
9.3
9.3.1
9.3.2
9.4

10
10.1
10.2
10.3

Hinting 76
What is Hinting? 76
Font-Wide Hints 77
Glyph-Level Hints 78
Adding Stem Hints 78
Adding Ghost Hints 80
Testing the Screen
Rendering 81

Error Handling 82
Glyph Names 82
Font Names 82
Duplicate Unicode
Values 83
10.4 Missing Outlines 83
10.4.1 Open Paths 83

10.4.2 Wrong Path Orientation 83
10.4.3 Multiple Paths on Top of
Each Other 83
1111.1

Import and Export 84
Vector Drawing
Applications 84
11.1.1 Adobe Illustrator 84
11.1.2 Sketch 84
11.2 FontLab Studio 84
11.2.1 From FontLab Studio 5 to
Glyphs Mini 84
11.2.2 From Glyphs Mini to
FontLab Studio 5 84
11.3 OpenType 85
11.3.1 Opening Existing Fonts 85
11.3.2 Generating OpenType
Fonts 85
11.3.3 Generating Webfonts 86
12
12.1

Preferences 87
Accessing Application
Preferences 87
12.1.1 Updates 87
12.1.2 User Settings 87
12.1.3 Sample Strings 88
13
13.1

Appendix 90
Automatic Feature
Generation 90

1 Glyphs
1.1

GLYPHS MINI
Glyphs Mini is a trimmed-down, light version of theapplication. It is primarily a tool for designing and producing
new fonts. Its main principle is that you can edit glyphs
in a word context. All tools are optimized for a type design
workflow as natural, quick, and intuitive as possible.
We believe that you should be able to focus on yourdesign and only be bothered with technicalities if it is reallynecessary. There is no need for keeping a design version next
to a production version of your font. All production steps takeplace at export time. By default, Glyphs Mini automates a lotof technical details for you. It lacks many of the advanced
features of the full application, e.g., support for plug-ins, glyph
layers, Multiple Masters, Python scripting, custom OpenType
feature code, custom parameters, and manual hinting.
It is intended as a simple and affordable entry-level
solution for casual type design or putting together a dingbat(symbol) font. All available tools and uses are described in thishandbook.
Glyphs Mini exports OpenType/CFF (Compact Font Format,
suffix .otf) and Webfont (suffix .woff). Glyphs Mini canopen existing fonts. However, in the import process, some
information stored in the font may be lost. For details, seechapter 11, ‘Import and Export’ (p. 84).

1.2

INSTALLATION
Glyphs Mini is a Mac-only application. Glyphs Mini 2.0 or
higher requires at least macOS 10.9.5 Mavericks. Download
the trial from glyphsapp.com/mini and move the app into
your Applications folder, which you can access in Finder via
Go > Applications (Cmd-Shift-A). To unlock the trial, open
the .glyphsmini2license file you purchased, either by simply
double clicking the license file, or by dragging it onto theapp icon.

1.3

COMMUNITY
If you have questions, bug reports or suggestions, you canregister for free in the Glyphs forum at forum.glyphsapp.com .

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   6

1.4

UPDATESThe application is updated on a regular basis. The latest
feature additions are described on glyphsapp.com/blog. You
can check which version you have by choosing Glyphs Mini >About Glyphs Mini and trigger an update with Glyphs Mini >Check for Updates or by activating automatic updates in Glyphs
Mini > Preferences > Updates. For more details, see section 12.1.1,‘Updates’ (p. 87).

If you downloaded Glyphs
Mini from the AppStore,
you can keep it up todate with AppStore app.

1.5

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
To enable a workflow as efficient as possible, Glyphs Mini
employs a number of keyboard shortcuts. You can set yourown shortcuts in the macOS System Preferences, under
Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. Click on the plus and add
Glyphs Mini.
Some shortcuts conflict with default shortcuts for system
functions like Cmd-Space for Spotlight or Ctrl-Arrows forswitching between Spaces. To enable the full functionalityof the application, it is advisable to change these systemshortcuts in the System Preferences.

1.6

GLYPHS
The full version of Glyphs offers many more tools and ways todesign and produce your fonts. You can customize OpenType
feature code, and a wide range of automatic features. Glyphs
also offers a wide range of non-Latin support, including
complex scripts like Arabic and Devanagari. You can add
Multiple Masters and glyph layers, and extend the appfunctionality with third-party plug-ins and Python scripts.
The full version exports OpenType fonts of all flavors:
OpenType/CFF (Compact Font Format, suffix .otf), OpenType/TT (TrueType, suffix .ttf), and the webfont formats WOFF andWOFF2 (Web Open Font Format, suffixes .woff and .woff2), andEOT (Embeddable OpenType, suffix .eot).

1.7

CRASH REPORTS
After an application crash, you will see two crash reportdialogs. First, a generic one that goes to Apple, and secondly,
when the app restarts, you will see a report dialog thatsports the Glyphs Mini app icon in the top left. The genericcrash report goes to Apple, and never reaches us. The second
one (with the Glyphs Mini icon) is essential for us to fixGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   7

the problem that caused the crash. So, please, in your own
interest, always send those reports. If you do, we will receive
some technical information about your hardware, your OS,
and the last state of the Glyphs Mini application, and some
additional information such as the exact time your crashhappened.
When run for the first time, Glyphs Mini will ask for accessto your contacts, in order to auto-fill your name and e-mailaddress in the crash reports. If you do not wish to grant thataccess, you can later manually enter your info when thecrash report dialog appears, or simply leave the fields blank.

 	

Providing your contact information, however, allows us to getback to you. In order to fix the bug that caused the crash on
your machine, we may ask you for the file you were working
on when the crash happened. We delete the files after wehave dealt with your problem, and do not hand them over
to a third party without your explicit consent. If you canreliably reproduce a crash, it is a good idea to describe thesteps for reproducing it, either directly in the crash reportdialog, in the forum or by email.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   8

2 Edit View
2.1

EDITING GLYPHS
In Edit view, you can edit glyphs. To access Edit view, you needto open an Edit tab with View > New Tab (Cmd-T). To access anexisting tab, either click on the respective tab title or press thenumber of the tab (2 through 9) while holding down Cmd-Opt.
The first tab (Cmd-Opt-1) is always the Font view. For moredetails, see chapter 5, ‘Font View’ (p. 45).
The Edit view has two modes, edit mode and text mode.
Access text mode by activating the Text tool (keyboard
shortcut T). For more details, see section 2.8, ‘EnteringText’ (p. 28). Switch into edit mode by either choosing one ofthe other tools, double clicking one of the displayed glyphs, orpressing the Esc key when the text cursor is situated in frontof a glyph.

You can prevent further
changes in a glyph byenabling the Locked option
in the context menu
(right or Ctrl-click). A locksymbol will appear in edit
mode to indicate its status.
Disable the Locked option
to allow editing again.

2.2

DRAWING PATHS
Create new paths with the Draw, Pencil or Primitives tools.

2.2.1 Draw Tool
When the Draw tool (shortcut P as in ‘Path’ or ‘Pen’) is
active, click anywhere in the canvas to create straight lines,
or click and drag to create curve segments. If you keep yourThis handbook uses theterm ‘node’ to refer to onmouse button pressed, you can move the on-curve point
curves, ‘handle’ for off-curves,
by holding down the space bar on your keyboard. Close theand ‘point’ as an umbrella
outline by clicking on its first node.
word for both types.
Nodes in smooth connections will appear as green circles.
You can set a different color in Glyphs Mini > Preferences > User
Settings. A smooth connection can either be a curve (an oncurve point in line with two surrounding off-curve points) ora tangent (an on-curve point in line with another on-curve
point and an off-curve point). You can trigger the display ofnodes with View > Show Nodes.

In order to draw a corner, hold down the Option key whiledragging. Corner points are marked by blue squares. Again,Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   9

you can choose a different color in Glyphs Mini > Preferences >User Settings. Points in a corner connection are not kept in line,
so you can move them independently from each other.

Handles (Bézier control points or BCPs, off-curve points)
control the curvature of the path segment and are displayed
as small gray circles. In open paths, start and end points are
displayed as short perpendicular blue lines. The start point
also features a blue triangle, indicating the path direction, i.e.,the stored order of the points. The path direction is importantfor certain path functions and glyph rendering (see 2.3.14,‘Controlling Path Direction’, p. 20).
2.2.2 Pencil Tool
The Pencil tool (shortcut B) offers a quick way to draw
freehand curves, especially for people using tablets. The
resulting paths will need some cleaning up. That is because
the Pencil paths will usually contain too many nodes in orderto stay as close as possible to the cursor movement.
2.2.3 Pixel Tool
The Pixel tool (shortcut H) is a quick way to add pixel
components to your glyph, which can be helpful if you wantto create a pixel font. Click and hold the Pencil tool or press
the shortcut key to access the tool. For the Pixel tool to work,
you need a glyph named ‘pixel’ (see 5.2.1, ‘Generating New
Glyphs’, p. 46), and an appropriate Grid Spacing setting in
File > Font Info … (Cmd-I). The Pixel tool uses the grid step, thefirst value of the Grid Spacing pair, for positioning the pixel
components.
Usually, best results are achieved if the grid step value isthe same as the size of the pixel. So, e.g., if you have a pixelthat is 50 units wide, the grid step should be 50 as well, i.e.,
set the Grid Spacing to 50/1. For details about components, seechapter 7, ‘Reusing Shapes’ (p. 61).

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   10To draw pixels, simply click and drag on the canvas. To
delete pixel components that have already been placed, clickon an existing pixel, and start dragging.

Using the Pixel tool without a pixel glyph in your font will
trigger a warning dialog that will also give you the option to
generate right away with an Add button. Pushing the button
will add a pixel glyph according to your grid settings, and set it
to not export.

2.2.4 Primitives
Glyphs Mini offers rectangles and ovals as built-in primitive
shapes. Click the tool or press F to activate it in its current
mode. Click and hold the Primitives tool or press Shift-F tochoose between the two shape options. Alternatively, you can
use Draw Circle or Draw Rect from the context menu to switch
between the two functions.

Click once on the canvas to create a primitive by entering its
measurements with the keyboard. Or click and drag to draw
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   11it directly into the edit area. Hold down Shift for a perfectsquare or circle. Hold down Option to draw from the center ofthe shape.

2.3

EDITING PATHS

2.3.1 Selecting Nodes and Paths
Click and drag with the Select tool (shortcut V) to selectnodes and handles inside a rectangular selection area. Holddown the Option key to ignore the handles and only selecton-curve nodes. Double click on or near an outline segment
to select complete paths. Hold down the Shift key to extend or
reduce the selection.
Glyphs Mini allows you to select multiple handles
independently of the nodes. You can also Shift-select any
number of handles in a non-contiguous selection. When asingle node or handle is selected, press the Tab key to selectthe following point on the path, or Shift-Tab to go to theprevious one.
2.3.2 Moving Selected Nodes and Paths
Move a selection using the mouse or the cursor keys. Moving
nodes will move the attached handles even if they are notselected. Hold down the Shift key for increments of 10, and theCmd key for increments of 100. Hold down the Option key tomove only explicitly selected on-curve points. While moving
one or more nodes, hold down both Ctrl and Option (or add
Option after you started dragging) to ‘nudge’ them, i.e., toproportionally adjust the surrounding unselected handles atthe same time.
Left: original glyph outline with
two selected nodes.
Center: selected nodes moved,
handles stay the same.
Right: selected nodes nudged,
handles are adjusted.

To move a handle, simply drag it with your mouse. Or select it
and use your arrow keys. If more than one handle is selected,
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   12you can move them all simultaneously. Moving one or more
handles while holding down the Option key preserves theirangles. Again, add the Shift key for increments of 10, or the
Cmd key for increments of 100.
While moving a handle next to a smooth (green) node, you
can hold down Ctrl and Option simultaneously to mirror thelength and angle of the adjacent handle on the other side of
the node.
Click anywhere on the segment and drag to quickly change
the shape of the segment. Option-drag a segment to change thehandle lengths, but keep their respective angles.
2.3.3 Lasso Tool
Click and hold the Selection tool to switch between the
Selection tool and the Lasso tool.

With the Lasso Tool, you can draw around the area in which
you want to select all points. To do so, click and drag the mousepointer. When you release, all nodes and handles inside theenclosed area will be selected.

2.3.4 Converting Nodes and Segments
Convert between (green) smooth connections and (blue) corners
by double clicking an on-curve point, or by selecting one ormore nodes and pressing Return.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   13The Glyph > Tidy up Paths command (Cmd-Opt-Shift-T)
applies heuristics to set the appropriate mode for all nodes atonce, or all selected nodes if there is a selection. It also removes
superfluous points, e.g., handles on a straight segment, or an
on-curve point exactly in line between two others.
Option-clicking a line segment converts it into a curve
segment, i.e., adds handles. To convert a curve back into a line
segment, select and delete one or both of its handles.

Tip: Quickly add handles
by Option-clicking on theoutline between two nodes.

2.3.5 Nodes in Alignment Zones

Nodes located exactly on a vertical metric line are highlighted
with a beige diamond. Inside an alignment zone, thehighlighting assumes the shape of a circle. This helps
controlling the position of nodes even at small zoom scales.
2.3.6 Scaling and Rotating
The attributes of the current node selection are shown in thegray Info box (View > Show Info, Cmd-Shift-I):
Tip: In all number input fields
throughout the application, you
can use the up and down cursor
keys to increase or decrease
the value. Simultaneously
holding down the Shift key
gives you increments of 10.

When more than one node is selected, you can scale ormove the selection by changing the numbers for its position(x and y) and its dimensions (↔ for width, ↕ for height) in
the Info box. Set the transformation origin with the ninereference points on the left. Close the lock symbol
to scalewidth and height proportionally. Open the lockto distortthe selection, i.e., scale width and height independently from

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   14each other. You can use the up and down arrow keys to step
through the numbers. Hold down Shift for increments of 10.
When multiple nodes are selected, the number next to thesolid square will indicate how many nodes and handles are
currently selected. The number next to the outlined square
represents the total number of on-curve and off-curve points
on the current glyph.
You can also rotate and scale your selection manuallywith the Rotate tool (shortcut R) and the Scale tool
(shortcut S). With one of these tools, click anywhere on thecanvas to set the transformation origin, then click and drag totransform the current selection. Hold down the Shift key torotate in steps of ninety degrees, or scale proportionally.

When more than one node is selected, you can choose todisplay a bounding box for the selection with View > Show
Bounding Box (Cmd-Opt-Shift-B). Drag any of the whiteknobs to scale with the opposite end of the selection astransformation origin. Hold down the Shift key to scale
proportionally, and the Option key to use the center astransformation origin.
More path transformations are possible via the Palette. See
section 3.4, ‘Transformations’ (p. 38) for further details.
2.3.7 Aligning
Choose Glyph > Align Selection (Cmd-Shift-A) to quickly alignall selected points. The command aligns both nodes andhandles. Glyphs Mini will then automatically choose between
horizontal and vertical alignment, whichever is smaller forthe current selection. The Align Selection command respects
the transformation origin of the gray Info box. Alternatively,
you can either set the width or the height value of two or
more selected points to zero in the Info Box.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   15You can center an anchor horizontally between to points
if you run the Align Selection command while two points andone anchor are selected.
Running the Align Selection command while exactly one
point and one component are selected, will align the origin
point of the component to the selected node. The node keeps
its position. The origin point is where the baseline crosses theleft sidebearing when the italic angle is zero. If the component
contains an anchor called ‘origin’, Glyphs Mini will use theposition of that anchor instead of the origin point for aligning
the component to a node.
Applying Glyph > Align Selection on a single node will try tomove the node over the nearest node in the background.
Glyph > Align Selection works on individual nodes. To alsoalign partial paths, complete paths or components to eachother, use the Transformations section of the Palette sidebar(Opt-Cmd-P). See chapter 3.4, ‘Transformations’ (p. 38), formore details.

If the italic angle is not zero,
instead of the left sidebearing,
an imaginary vertical line thatcrosses the slanted LSB at half
x-height is used. In that case,the origin point is where thisline crosses the baseline.

2.3.8 Duplicating Paths
To quickly duplicate a complete path, first select it entirely by
double clicking on or near it. Repeat with the Shift key to add
or subtract paths to the selection. Then, hold down the Option
key while you click and drag a copy of the paths into their
new position.
Alternatively, you can simply copy (Cmd-C) and paste(Cmd-V) the selected artwork. This method may make more
sense if you plan to position the new paths with the keyboard
rather than with the mouse.
Option-dragging partial paths will duplicate the selected
segments. This can be helpful when replicating glyph parts
like serifs or spurs.
2.3.9 Deleting Nodes
Simply select a node and press the Delete key to delete thenode. Alternatively, you can use the Erase tool (shortcut E).

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   16Glyphs Mini will keep the path closed and try to reconstruct
the path segment without the node:

Hold down the Option key to break the path, i.e., remove thenode and both path segments surrounding the node:

Tip: A quick way to get rid ofa path segment between two
nodes is to insert a point with
the Draw tool (shortcut P) and
immediately Option-delete it.

To get rid of a segment between two on-curve nodes, switch
to the Erase tool
(shortcut E or Shift-E), and while you holddown the Option key, click on the path segment. Alternatively,
you can select a handle and press Opt-Delete. Or select thecomplete segment, including the on-curve nodes at the edges,
and press Opt-Delete. This also works for multiple segments,
adjacent or non-adjacent:2.3.10 Opening and Closing Paths
With the Draw tool (shortcut P), click on a node to open
the path in the position of the node. Open path endings areGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   17

marked by short blue perpendicular lines. You can now dragthem apart with the Select tool (shortcut V).

To close the path again, simply drag an open line ending on
top of another with the Select tool (shortcut V). Alternatively,
you can close all open paths in a glyph by right-clicking
anywhere in the canvas and choosing Close Open Paths fromthe context menu. Or select two open ends, and choose Connect
Nodes from the context menu.

Tip: When multiple tools
share one icon in the
toolbar such as the Knife
and Erase tools, you can add
Shift to the tool shortcut totoggle between the tools.

2.3.11 Cutting Paths
With the Knife tool (shortcut E or Shift-E), click and draga line across a path, to cut the outline into two separate
outlines. Glyphs Mini will close the two resulting paths along
the cutting line. If you cut across several overlapping paths, itwill rewire the segments with each other.

To activate the Knife tool when it is not displayed in the
toolbar, click and hold the Erase tool , and choose Knife fromthe pop-up menu. Alternatively, you can press Shift-E.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   182.3.12 Remove Overlap
When Glyph > Remove Overlap is triggered, it immediately
removes overlaps of selected paths, or all paths
if none are selected. It also clears the selected glyph of all
open paths and stray nodes. The function expects all outline
orientations to be set correctly (see 2.3.13, ‘Controlling Path
Direction’, p. 19). To maintain overlaps in shapes while
editing, you can have overlaps removed automatically at
export with the respective option in the export dialog (see 11.3,‘OpenType’, p. 82).
2.3.13 Resegmenting Outlines
The results of the Open Cornerand Reconnect Nodes operations.
Opening corners only workson (blue) corner points.

In order to recreate overlaps in a path, select an even numberof nodes and choose Reconnect Nodes from the context menu.
To open the context menu, right-click or Ctrl-click anywherein the canvas. Glyphs Mini will then proceed to reconnect
each node with its closest selected neighbor. The Open Cornercommand creates a triangular overlap at each selected
point. Resegmenting your outlines this way allows you tomanipulate the path segments independently from each other.
It can also make interpolation significantly easier.
The size of the created overlap will be approximately half
the first values entered for vertical and horizontal stems
in File > Font Info (Cmd-I). Thus, the created overlap should
comfortably reach into the middle of your stems.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   19

Opened corners will be considered invisible if the triangular
overlaps are small enough in relation to the neighboring
visible outline segments. That way, opened corners can also beplaced on the outside of paths. If the overlap size goes beyond
the threshold size, then they will become visible again. This isuseful for editing bent finials, as in a sans-serif lowercase s.
2.3.14 Controlling Path Direction
The starting point of a closed path is displayed as a triangle
indicating the path direction. Again, green and blue denote asmooth connection or a corner, respectively. On a closed path,
you can make any on-curve node the first node by picking
Make Node First from its context menu.
All outer (black) paths need to run counter-clockwise, while
Tip: The easiest and quickest
way to get a hole in a glyph is(white) counters must go clockwise. You can change a path’s
to draw both inner and outerdirection by selecting it and choosing Glyph > Reverse Contours
shapes, and press Cmd-Shift-R
or Reverse Selected Contours from the context menu. One node(Correct Path Direction).
on each path will suffice as path selection in this case. Whenno path is selected, you can use Glyph > Reverse Contours totoggle all path directions in a glyph.

Glyph > Correct Path Direction (Cmd-Shift-R) will perform an
informed guess and find the right path orientation for all
contours in selected glyphs. This will also rearrange thecontour order, and reset the starting points of all paths to thebottom left nodes.
2.3.15 Extremes and Inflections
Extrema are all positions on a path with a completely
horizontal or vertical tangent. An inflection is the position inGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   20some path segments where the segment changes its bend fromclockwise to counterclockwise or vice versa. It is consideredgood practice to have nodes on extremum points. Some
font technologies, like hinting, and some path operations,like nudging, see section 2.3.2, ‘Moving Selected Nodes andPaths’ (p. 12), require nodes at extremum positions. Some
operations, like offsetting a curve (see 4.2.2, ‘Offset Curve’,p. 42), work better with inflection points. Also, some fontrenderers may behave unexpectedly if such nodes are notin place. Also, you may want to avoid additional nodes inorder to keep the overall file size as small as possible, e.g., forwebfont production.
You can insert nodes on extremum and inflection points by
Shift-clicking a segment with the Path tool (P). A node will beinserted at the nearest extremum or inflection.
Alternatively, you can also choose Glyph > Add Extremes
and nodes will be added at extremes on all paths of the active
glyph. Glyphs Mini will not add an extreme if the resulting
segment would be very short. In this case, it assumes that thenode placement was intentional. On the other hand, if a nodeis only very slightly off the extremum position, Glyphs Mini
will attempt to preserve the outline shape while moving thenode into the extremum position and turning the surrounding
handles entirely vertical or horizontal.
2.3.16 Duplicate Nodes
When two adjacent on-curve nodes share the same
coordinates, thus producing a zero-length segment, they arehighlighted with a red circle. You can merge these nodes with
Glyph > Tidy Up Paths (Cmd-Opt-Shift-T).

2.4 ANCHORS
2.4.1 Compound and Positioning Anchors
Anchors are special points that fulfill multiple tasks in
Glyphs Mini. Primarily, they serve as a connecting pivot for
automatically aligning components, corners and caps, asGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   21

well as for Mark-to-Base and Mark-to-Mark Positioning (see7, ‘Reusing Shapes’, p. 61). These anchors adhere to certain
naming conventions. For more details on these uses, seesection 7.1.5, ‘Anchors’ (p. 63). When an ‘origin’ anchor isplaced inside a glyph, it can be used for aligning a component,see section 2.3.7, ‘Aligning’ (p. 15) to a regular path node.
2.4.2 Ligature Carets
Ligature caret positions are the positions where the text
entry cursor is displayed when placed somewhere inside aligature. In a ligature glyph, these positions are defined by
special anchors on the baseline. They must be named ‘caret’,followed by an underscore suffix, e.g., ‘caret_1’, ‘caret_2’, etc. The
suffix needs to be different for each anchor, because anchor
names must be unique inside each glyph. The numberingorder does not matter, the numbers are used exclusively
for differentiation.

caret_1

Glyph > Set Anchors (Cmd-U) will insert appropriate caretanchors in properly named ligature glyphs, i.e., the names of
the characters in the ligature, connected by underscores, e.g.,s_t or f_f_h. For the glyph naming convention employed by
Glyphs Mini, see section 5.6, ‘Names and Unicode’ (p. 53). At
export, Glyphs Mini will use the caret information to build socalled LigatureCaretByPos instructions in the GDEF OpenTypetable. At the time of this writing, the only known software
supporting ligature caret positioning are Mac applications thatmake use of the Cocoa text engine. Adobe and Microsoft apps
ignore this information.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   22

2.4.3 Adding, Editing and Removing Anchors
Insert an anchor by Ctrl-clicking or right-clicking inside a
glyph, and choosing Add Anchor from the context menu. An
anchor called ‘new anchor’ will be placed at the click position.
Its name is immediately selected for renaming, so you canenter the name right away. Confirm the new name by pressing
the Return key or clicking anywhere in the canvas.
To change an anchor name, select it, press the Return key,
and type a new name. Alternatively, click or double click its
name in the gray Info box when the anchor is selected, andtype a new name there.
The built-in glyph info database has default anchorsassociated with some glyphs. To have them added
automatically, choose Glyph > Set Anchors (Cmd-U).
Select an anchor by clicking on the red dot that represents
it. You can select the next or previous anchor by pressing the
Tab key, or Shift-Tab, respectively. Select multiple anchors
by Shift-clicking them. Names are only shown for selectedanchors. If you want to select all anchors, you may need torun Edit > Select All (Cmd-A) twice, since selecting all will selectall paths, and only select all anchors and components if allavailable paths have been selected already.
Move an anchor like you would move a node, i.e., eitherwith the mouse, the arrow keys, or through the gray Infobox. An anchor is diamond-shaped if it is placed exactly ona metric line such as the x-height or the baseline. It is circleshaped in all other cases. To quickly duplicate an anchor,
Option-drag it. Since anchor names must be unique inside a
glyph, an underscore will be added to the end of the name.
Remove one or more selected anchors by simply pressing
the Delete or Backspace key.
2.4.4 Mark to Base Positioning
Glyphs Mini can automatically build the ‘mark’ (Mark toBase) feature from combining (non-spacing) diacritical marks
containing underscore anchors, e.g., ‘_bottom’ or ‘_top’, in
combination with all base glyphs that carry correspondingbase anchors, e.g., ‘bottom’ or ‘top’. Latin combining diacriticalmarks carry a ‘comb’ at the end of their names, e.g., acutecombor macroncomb.
Combining diacritical marks have their own Unicode values
and thus can be typed or inserted in a text. This way, a userGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   23can place any mark on any base letter, by first typing theregular letter, and then inserting the combining mark.
Alongside the ‘mark’ feature, Glyphs Mini will also build the‘ccmp’ (Glyph Composition and Decomposition) if glyphs like
idotless and jdotless are present. See chapter 13.1, ‘Automatic
Feature Generation’ (p. 90), for further details.
2.4.5 Mark to Mark Positioning
If both underscore and regular anchors are present in
a combining diacritical mark, Glyphs Mini will also
automatically build the ‘mkmk’ (Mark to Mark) feature. A user
will then be able to stack any combining mark on any othercombining mark carrying both anchors.

2.5

GUIDELINES

2.5.1 Magnetic Guidelines
If you drag a node selection across the canvas, red lines willappear, indicating when your selection is aligned with othernodes or a vertical metric. You can temporarily deactivate
magnetic guidelines by holding down the Ctrl key.
Likewise, dragging a node or any other object will snap to
all nodes and handles on paths, as well as in components.
When you move close to a node in a component whiledragging, Glyphs Mini will fade in small representations of
the nodes inside the component. Again, you can disable nodesnapping by holding down the Ctrl key.
2.5.2 Local and Global Guidelines
To toggle the display of guidelines in Edit view, choose View >Show Guides (Cmd-Shift-L)
To add a static, local guideline to the currently displayed
glyph,
right- or Ctrl-click to open the context menu and choose
Pro User Tip: In order toquickly create a guideline
Add Guideline. A horizontal local guideline will be added atin measurement mode,the click position. If two nodes are selected while adding the
temporarily activate theguideline, it will be laid through the nodes. You can select it
Measurement tool byby clicking on it, alter its position by clicking and dragging
simultaneously holding down
its knob. Double click the circle to turn it perpendicular to
Ctrl-Opt-Cmd, and press
the G key while dragging
its original orientation. Click and drag a selected guidelinea measurement line.
anywhere else but on the knob to rotate it.
To create a global guideline, i.e., a guideline that appears
in all glyphs throughout the font, hold down the Option keyGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   24while navigating the context menu, and choose Add Global
Guideline. To toggle a guideline between local and global, selectit, and from the context menu, choose Make Global Guideline or
Make Local Guideline, respectively.
Quickly duplicate one or more local or global guidelines
by selecting them and holding down the Option key whiledragging them to a new position.
You can lock one or more guidelines by choosing Lock
Guidelines from their context menu. A locked guideline cannot
be selected and will display a lock symbol instead of its knob.
To unlock a guideline again, Ctrl- or right-click the knob andchoose Unlock Guide from the context menu.
From top to bottom:
unselected and selected
local guides, unselected
and selected global guides,
locked local guide, andlocked global guide.

Select a guideline by clicking anywhere on it: a filled knob
indicates a selected guideline. Press the Tab key to quickly
select the next, or Shift-Tab to select the previous guideline.
When a guideline is selected, you can move it using yourarrow keys (add Shift or Cmd for larger increments), or by
dragging its knob with the mouse, just like you would movea regular node. Change the angle by dragging the guideline
anywhere off the node. You can also enter values for its
position and its angle in the gray Info box (Cmd-Shift-I).
You can also mirror the guidelines via the Transformations
panel (see 3.4.2, ‘Mirroring’, p. 39).
By default, a guideline will be set relative to the left
sidebearing. However, if you change the alignment of theguideline by clicking on the Alignment iconin the Info box,
the guideline will stay fixed relative to theright sidebearingor
relative to both sidebearings. This can be useful for
slanted guidelines, especially when they are global or when
the right sidebearing is changed. With the measurement
checkbox , you can turn it into a measurement guideline.
For more details, see section 2.9, ‘Measuring’ (p. 30).

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   252.6 GLYPH DISPLAY
2.6.1 Zooming
There are many ways to zoom in and out in Edit view. If you
are on a MacBook or have a trackpad to your disposal, you can
use pinch and stretch gestures. Or hold down the Option key
and use a scroll gesture or the scroll wheel of your mouse. Or
activate the Zoom tool (shortcut Z) and click in the canvas
to zoom in, Opt-click to zoom out. Alternatively, click and dragacross an area, and it will be zoomed to fill the window. You
Tip: You may need to change
your Spotlight shortcut in the
can temporarily activate the Zoom tool by holding down CmdSystem Preferences for the CmdSpace for zooming in, or Opt-Cmd-Space for zooming out. If
Space shortcut to work in Glyphs.
Cmd-Space collides with another shortcut on your system, you
can try pressing Space before you add the Cmd key.
Or you can use the zoom commands from the View menu:
Zoom In (Cmd-plus) and Zoom Out (Cmd-dash). Zoom to Active
Glyph (Cmd-zero) will maximize the area between ascenderand descender in the window. Zoom to Actual Size (Cmd-Optzero) will zoom one font unit to the size of one screen point,i.e., one pixel on a classic low-resolution screen, two pixels on
the new high-resolution Retina screens.

Or you can use the zoom buttons in the bottom right cornerof the window. Alternatively, you can set the zoom value
numerically by entering a point height in the field between
the buttons. The value specifies at which size 1000 font units
will be displayed. Since macOS assumes a screen resolutionof 72 ppi, one point corresponds to one actual screen pixel,
so if you enter a value of 1000, one unit will zoom to one
pixel. On Retina displays, zooming is done according to theirhigher resolution, e.g., at 144 ppi, a unit will be zoomed to two
screen pixels.
2.6.2 Panning
You can use trackpad panning gestures, i.e., dragging two
fingers across your trackpad, to change the canvas excerpt of
the window. Use the wheel of your mouse to scroll vertically,
hold down Shift to scroll horizontally. Or, drag the scrollGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   26bars on the right and bottom edges of the displayed canvas.
If you have difficulties grabbing the scroll bars, consider
changing the scroll bar behavior in the General section of
System Preferences. Alternatively, you can switch to the Hand
tool (shortcut H) and drag the canvas around, or simply
hold down the space bar to temporarily switch to the Hand
tool. If you are in text mode, simply pressing the space bar
would add a space to your sample text. To avoid that, you canpress Cmd-Space and subsequently release the Command key.

Tip: Cmd-Space mayinterfere with the systemwide shortcut for invoking
Spotlight. You can change itin the System Preferences.

2.6.3 View Options
In the View menu, you can toggle several options that
influence the glyph display in Edit view.
• Show Nodes displays on- and off-curve nodes of paths,• Show Metrics shows the vertical and horizontal metrics ofthe glyph,• Fill Preview displays closed paths with a black fill.
2.6.4 Glyph Colors
In Edit view, you can set glyph label colors via the context
menu. Right- or Ctrl-click anywhere in the canvas of an active
glyph, and pick the color from the context menu.

The glyph color will be displayed in the gray Info box (View >Show Info, Cmd Shift-I):Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   27This corresponds with the display of label colors in Font view.
See section 5.3.5, ‘Color Label’ (p. 48).

2.7

BACKGROUND
Each glyph has a background layer, usually simply referred
to as ‘background’. The background is useful for temporarily
storing a path, or for tracking changes and comparing outlines
before and after a manipulation.
While working in the foreground, objects on the
background can be displayed as subtle gray outline with View >Show Background (Cmd-Shift-B). If this option is active while
you are working in the background, the foreground objects
will be displayed this way. When the background is displayed,snapping will also work with objects on the background layer.
To switch to the background, choose Glyph > Edit Background(Cmd-B). The window display will darken slightly to indicatethat you are in the background layer. You can set a different
color in Glyphs Mini > Preferences > User Settings.
Glyph > Selection to Background (Cmd-K) replaces the current
content of the background with the active selection, thisworks in reverse when the background is active.
Via Glyph > Assign Background, you can copy theoutlines of another font file into the background layer ofall selected glyphs. You can also put the same font into
its own background in order to keep track of your ownchanges. Selecting all glyphs and choosing Glyph > Selection to
Background (Cmd-K) has the same effect.

2.8 ENTERING TEXTThe Edit view also acts as a simple text editor, and as such,allows you to edit your glyphs in the context of a whole wordor even a sentence. As long as the Text tool (T) is active, it
accepts input via the current input source set in the System
Preferences, the Keyboard Viewer, the Character Viewer,
but also via the clipboard or Edit > Emojis & Symbols. With
Edit > Start Dictation (Cmd-Cmd), you can even use the speech
recognition features provided by macOS and dictate your text.
The Edit view has a preset line width. You can set the
maximum line width in the application preferences. SelectGlyphs Mini > Preferences > User Settings and edit the Text View
Width value accordingly. The value in design units. Their

Tip: To quickly switch backfrom text entry to editing thecurrent glyph, press the Esc key.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   28relation to the em size is defined by the Units per Em value in
File > Font Info.

 	
Keep in mind that a lot of text in the Edit area will slow down
the application, especially if the Preview is displayed. If you
want to test your font with large chunks of text, it is advisable
to use the Adobe Fonts folder, see section 2.11.2, ‘Previewing in
Adobe Applications’ (p. 36) for further details.
2.8.1 Sample Texts

You can edit and store any number of sample texts in Glyphs
Mini > Preferences > Sample Strings (see 12.1.3, ‘Sample Strings’,
p. 88). To make an Edit tab display any of these texts, choose
Edit > Select Sample Text (Opt-Cmd-F). In the appearing dialog,
use your arrow keys or click on a line to pick the sample text
and press Return or click the OK button afterwards.
2.8.2 Text Tool
Select the Text tool (shortcut T) to switch to text modeand start typing. You can enter multiple words, completeGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   29sentences, even line breaks. You can copy and paste text intoand from the Edit tab. The arrow keys, the Edit commands
and macOS Application Services work as they would in any
Mac app.
The current glyph is the one to the right of the cursor.
You can switch to the previous or next glyph in the font bypressing the Home and End key, respectively. Add Shift toadvance through the glyphs as they are currently visible in
the Font tab. This is useful when you filter glyphs in the Fontview and then want to step through each one of them.
To insert one or more glyphs that you cannot or do notknow how to type with the keyboard, choose Edit > Find >Find … (Cmd-F). In the dialog that appears, enter the glyph
name, a part of it, or different parts of the glyph names
separated by spaces. The dialog will show a list of available
glyphs whose name contain the strings you entered. E.g.,‘dier 01’ will find all glyphs that have both ‘dier’ and ‘sc’ intheir name, like adieresis.sc and edieresis.sc. Select the glyphs
you want and press Return or click the Select button to insert
them into your sample text. To select a range of glyphs, holddown the Shift key. For a non-contiguous selection, hold down
the Cmd key.

Tip: On a MacBook, you cansimulate Home and End
by pressing Fn-leftarrow
and Fn-rightarrow.

2.9 MEASURING
Glyphs Mini offers several ways to determine coordinates andto measure distances between points and curves.
2.9.1 Info Box
You can toggle the display of the gray Info box with View >Show Info (Cmd-Shift-I). The Info box always displays data
relevant to the current selection. If there is exactly one node
selected, its coordinates will be displayed.

Select a handle (off-curve point, Bézier control point), and theInfo box will also show its delta values (x and y differenceGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   30to the on-curve point) and the total length of the handle(distance to the on-curve point).

If you select more than one point, be it on- or off-curve
points, the Info box will display the width (↔) and theheight (↕) of the box defined by the current selection. The
x and y coordinates displayed describe the position of thebounding box of the selection as indicated by the grid, i.e., thebottom center point of the grid indicates that the coordinates
describe the bottom center point of the bounding box. The
two numbers to the right indicate the count of nodes in thecurrent glyph, and in the current selection, respectively.

Tip: To quickly and precisely
measure a stem or bowl
width, select two nodes thatindicate the width and see
what the Info box displays
next to the width symbol.

In the Info box, any displayed number (except for the nodecounts) can be selected and changed by entering a new value.
You can use the Tab key to advance to the next number
slot displayed, and Shift-Tab to switch to the previous slot.
Changes take effect once you press Return or tab out of a value
field. Alternatively, you can use the up and down arrows forincreasing and decreasing the number by one unit. Add Shiftfor increments of 10. If you scale a selection this way, the locksymbol toggles proportional x/y scaling, and the grid controls
the scaling origin.
When a component is selected, the Info box will display thename of the original glyph the component points to, its x andy offset, its horizontal and vertical scale in percent, and its
counter-clockwise rotation angle. The little arrow button in
the top right corner will insert the original glyph in the Edittab string, to the left of the current glyph, and activate it forediting. For more details on working with components, seesection 7, ‘Reusing Shapes’ (p. 61).

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   31You can change the glyph the component points to by clicking
on its name in the gray Info box, and choosing anotherglyph from the glyph list in the subsequent pop-up window.
Change position, size, and rotation by manipulating therespective number values. Use the up and down arrows to
step through values, and add Shift or Cmd for incrementsof 10 or 100, respectively. Changing the position only has aneffect if the component is not automatically aligned. For moredetails on automatic alignment, see section 7.1.6, ‘Automatic
Alignment’ (p. 65).
2.9.2 Measurement Tool
Switching to the Measurement Tool
(shortcut L) allows you
to see all coordinates of all nodes and anchors at once.
279, 479-210, -250

121, 17169, 229-210, 250

279, 400

121, -171

400, 229

158, 229-121, 172

210, -251

279, 57

489, 229-121, -172
210, 251

279, -22

The blue numbers are the x and y coordinates of the oncurve points, the red numbers are the x and y delta values
between the on-curve points. These values help you check thesymmetry of your curves.
Clicking and dragging draws a ruler that displays precise
measures between all of its intersections with outlines.
Add Shift to drag a horizontal or vertical ruler. At the endof the ruler, its angle is displayed in counter-clockwise

The x delta values respect theitalic angle set in Font Info. So,
an x delta of zero indicates aline exactly in the italic angle.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   32

325, 181

degrees, where zero degrees corresponds to dragging the ruler
completely horizontally to the right.
-184.3, 303

131.2, -242

15.4°
54.9

143.0

34.3

k

96

249, 0146, 0199, 0
Font

006B
-13

ïb ïf ïj ïk ïl ït Iï iï

The Measurement Tool works on164,
all0 visible glyphs in Edit
Allegra Gerade.glyphs - abc Allegra
341, 0505, 0view. So, you
can drag a measurement line across multiple
glyphs and see the individual distances:/f_k.liga◆/e.sc/oe.sc/ae…

s12nⁿ

col/periodcent…

CGOQS/dotacc…

Á/acutecomb.c…

/acutecomb.case

Ysop Ytong YumanoðnnisKerningk65, 660-146, 0211, 660

2428 pt

142, 620

208, 446

89.8

146.5

36.3

175.3

-0.5, -660
40.0 146.5

116.3

61.8

0.0°

-0.5, 66053, 0129, 0147,200, 0l
Kerningn (57)006C
n (57)

Kerning

You can temporarily activate the ruler and the display of point
coordinates by simultaneously holding down Ctrl, Option
and Command. Pressing the G key while dragging a ruler adds
a guideline in measurement mode.
hFeatures261

l2.9.3 Measurement Guidelines
Any guideline, even a global guideline, can be turned into ameasurement guideline. Simply click on the guideline to selectit, and then, click on the measurement symbolin the gray
Info box. You can handle measurement guidelines exactly asGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   33regular guidelines, see section 2.5, ‘Guidelines’ (p. 24) for
more details.

Similar to the Measurement tool, guidelines in measurementmode will display the distance between their intersections
with outlines or components. Contrary to the tool, they
always do so as long as guidelines are shown, no matter which
tool is active.

248.9

98.3

195.8

91.0

2.10 IMAGES
2.10.1 Adding Images
You can add all image files supported by macOS, including
PDFs, to any glyph simply by dragging them onto a glyph cellin Font view, or into the active glyph in Edit view. You can
add many images at once by choosing Glyph > Add Image andselecting any number of image files in the subsequent Open
File dialog. The images will be placed in the current glyphs
that correspond to the file names. E.g., if your scans are called
Thorn.png and thorn.jpeg, they will be placed in the glyphs
Thorn and thorn, respectively. For this to work, you may haveto place scans for uppercase and lowercase letters in separate
folders. That is because, by default, the macOS file system is
set to be case-insensitive, and thus, same names with different
capitalizations cannot coexist in the same macOS folder.
In the Glyphs Mini document, only the relative path of
the image is stored. Thus it is a good idea to keep them inGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   34a subfolder next to the Glyphs Mini file. If the path to theplaced image is outdated or broken, it will be indicated with a
missing image symbol:

You can toggle the display of images via View > Show
Image. Even if this setting is off, images will be displayed
as long as the glyph is empty, i.e., contains neither paths
nor components.
2.10.2 Manipulating Images
By default, images will be scaled to a size where one DTP point
corresponds to one font unit, and placed at the origin pointof the glyph. If you plan to place a lot of images, consider
preparing their size accordingly.
Move the image by dragging it to the desired position. Whenan image is selected, you can resize it with the bounding box(Cmd-Opt-Shift-B) or the Scale tool (S). You can rotate it with
the Rotate tool (R). The Transformations palette also works
for images.
The gray Info box (Cmd-Shift-I) allows you to numericallycontrol position (x and y) and dimensions (↔ for width, ↕ forheight) of the selected image. You can also rotate the image
counter-clockwise by manipulating the degree figure next tothe curved arrow symbol. A click on the right-pointing arrowsymbol will reveal the original image file in Finder. A click on
the lock symbol freezes the image status until you unlock itagain via the context menu.

Besides locking and unlocking an image, the context menu lets
you crop the image to the glyph bounds (width, descender, andascender), and reveal the image file in Finder.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   352.11 PREVIEWING AND TESTING
2.11.1 Previewing in macOS
Because of the complicated font caching mechanism employedby macOS, simply overwriting a previously installed font
can lead to a range of problems. Amongst other things, thefont may not show the changes you made in Glyphs, or may
show wrong glyphs for the characters typed, display empty
or garbled glyphs, or even disappear from the font menu. In
Because of the described
difficulties with the macOS
order to avoid such font cache difficulties, you can change thefont cache, we do notfamily name in File > Font Info > Font (Cmd-I) every time you
recommend testing unfinishedexport, e.g., by adding an incremental number (‘MyFont 01’,
fonts in Font Book.
‘MyFont 02’, ‘MyFont 03’ etc.) or a letter combination(‘MyFont AA’, ‘MyFont AB’ etc.). This scheme ensures a moreconsistent font menu ordering if you have many versions ofyour font installed.
If you do run into cache problems, close all runningapplications and remove all instances of your font from Font
Book or the Fonts folder. Then, open the Terminal applicationand type these lines, each of them completed by pressing
the Return key. The first command will prompt you for youradministrator password. You will not see bullets while you
type your password.
sudo atsutil databases -remove
atsutil server -shutdown
atsutil server -pingAfter these Terminal commands, you need to restart the Mac
for the changes to take effect. If the problems persist, boot the
Mac in safe mode, i.e., hold down Cmd-S at startup until theApple logo appears on screen. Recreate caches by holding down
the Shift key while restarting and logging in.
2.11.2 Previewing in Adobe Applications
For a complete preview including things like positioning
features and menu ordering, just pick File > Export (Cmd-E),
pick the OpenType export, and choose /Library/Application
Support/Adobe/Fonts/ as Export Destination. The font
becomes immediately available in all Adobe applications. Any
previously saved instance of the font in this folder will beoverwritten. The font will not be available outside Adobe apps,
but this is a convenient way to circumvent any font cacheproblems in macOS.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   36If the Fonts folder does not exist, you can create it rightin the Open Folder dialog by pressing Cmd-Shift-N. Only incase they were already running while the folder was created,
you have to restart Adobe apps this once for the change totake effect. After that, the Adobe font menus will update
immediately every time the font is exported.

2.11.3 Previewing in Web Browsers
You can also export webfonts via File > Export > Webfonts(WOFF). For repeated exports, you can set an Export Destinationin the same dialog. If you set up an HTML file containing atest page that uses the webfonts, you can open the file in a
web browser, and reload the page every time a new version of
the font was exported. Since the webfont files are overwritten
during the export, reloading the page in the web browser
should show the new version of the font. Some web browsers
also employ font caches, though. If a reload does not show the
new font, most Mac browsers offer you to force a clean reloadof the page by holding down the Shift key while clicking on
the reload button, or in addition to the keyboard shortcut for
reloading (usually Cmd-R).

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   373 Palette
3.1

PALETTE SIDEBAR
You can open the Palette sidebar with the sidebar button in
the top right corner of the window, or via Window > Palette(Opt-Cmd-P). By default, the Palette has four sections. You
can collapse or expand them by clicking on their title or the
triangle next to it.

3.2

DIMENSIONSThe entries in the Dimensions section have no effect on the
font. They serve as a cheat sheet for your personal design
process. Simply enter values for the displayed measurements.

3.3

Smaller curves, e.g. counters,
generally need higher curvature
percentages than larger curves,e.g., on the outside of a bowl.

3.4

FIT CURVE
The Fit Curve panel helps creating curves with matching or
corresponding curvatures. Select percentages by setting theleft field to the minimum value and the right field to the
maximum value. The eight buttons in between represent
equal steps between these two values. Alternatively, you
can use Ctrl-Opt-1 through 8 as keyboard shortcuts for the
buttons. For the Fit Curve function to take effect, at least one
handle must be selected. Fit Curve also works on multiple
segments, provided that at least one handle of each segment
is selected.
The numbers describe the percentage length of the handle.
The distance from the curve point to the intersection of thehandles equals 100 percent. 56 percent give you an elliptic
curvature. The minimum value you can set is 1 percent, themaximum value is 100 percent. If you want a completely flat
segment, select one of the handles and press the Delete key inorder to turn the segment into a line.

TRANSFORMATIONS
The bottom section of the palette is reserved for object
transformations. Once you have set the transformation origin,
you can, from top to bottom:• mirror the selection horizontally or
vertically,• scale the selection down or up, horizontally and/or
vertically, by percentage values,• rotate the selection counterclockwise or clockwise
by degrees,Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   38• skew the selection left or right by degrees,• align nodes, complete paths or components to each other,• and execute boolean operations with two paths.
The transformations work in both the Font and the Edit view.
Depending on the selection, the transformations work on
paths, parts of paths, or complete glyphs, even when multiple
glyphs are selected. Note that, if you execute a transformation
while a unit grid is active (see 6.10, ‘Grid Spacing andSubdivision’, p. 59), the placement of the on-curve nodes will
be subject to rounding.
3.4.1 Transformation Origin
Except for aligning, all transformations available in the paletterespect the transformation origin you set in the top row. Thiscan either be a grid point calculated relative to the boundingbox of the selection, similar to the grid in the gray Info box(Cmd-Shift-I).
Or, it can be a manually set reference point. To change
the reference point, you need to switch to either the Rotate(shortcut R) or the Scale (shortcut S) tool, and click once inthe canvas.
Or, it can beone of the metrics taken from the entries
in File > Font Info (Cmd-I): baseline, (half or full) x-height and(half or full) cap height.

Tip: If you copy and paste
the paths of the lowercase
n into your lowercase u,
you can mirror horizontallyand vertically aroundhalf the x-height, rather
than around the selection
center. This way, theovershoot is respected.

3.4.2 Mirroring
Mirroring can be applied to point selections, complete
selected paths, guidelines and selected components, or any
combination thereof. Mirroring a corner component will turna left corner into a right corner and vice versa.

3.4.3 Reversible Transformations
The corresponding buttons to the left and right of the
Scale, Rotate, and Skew fields, are each other’s reverse
transformations. Thus you can reverse any of the transforms
with their complimentary buttons, and the points will assume
their previous position, even when a unit grid is in effect androunding has been applied to point coordinates.
If you want to scale down all
coordinates by half, you need
Scaling takes two percentage values, for horizontal (x) andto enter 100 percent and click
vertical (y) scaling, respectively. When the lock symbol isreverse-scale button,theclosed, the second value will be ignored and the first value
or enter 50 percent and click
applies to both x and y scaling. The entered values refer totheupscale button.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   39

positive scaling which is activated by pushing the upscale
button. This means that the reverse-scale button does notscale down by the entered values, but reverses the positivetransformation. This way, you can always undo a positive
scale with the reverse-scale button and vice versa.
The Rotate and Slant functions work on any selection.
Again, the buttons compliment each other, by reversing eachothers’ transformations.
3.4.4 Aligning
The Align buttons work on complete and partial paths, as wellas components. If a path is selected only partially, the selected
nodes are aligned to each other. Aligning via the buttons isalways done relative to the bounding box of the selection.
For most use cases, a quicker way to align selected points is
Glyph > Align Selection (Cmd-Shift-A). This command respects
the grid setting for the transformation origin. See section 2.3,
‘Editing Paths’ (p. 12), for more details.
3.4.5 Boolean Operations
The bottom row of buttons allows for boolean operations:
union, subtraction, and intersection. Union andintersection work with the selected paths, or all paths if none
are selected. The subtraction operation subtracts the selected
paths from the unselected ones. Or, if no paths are selected,
it subtracts the front-most, i.e., last, path from all others.
In order to achieve consistent results, both groups of paths
involved, i.e., either the selected and the unselected paths,
or the front-most and all other paths, are merged before thesubtraction is executed between them.
From left to right:(1) two overlapping paths
before the boolean operation;(2) union; (3) subtract;(4) intersection.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   40

4 Filters
4.1

FILTERS MENUIn Edit view, or, with the Text tool (shortcut T), you can apply
filters to any number of selected glyphs. In the Font view, you
can apply it to all selected glyphs at once.

4.2 FILTERS
4.2.1 Hatch Outline
Creates hatched letters. Distance, width, and angle of thehatch-lines can be chosen. Glyphs Mini always uses the
background path as source. If there is no path, Glyphs Mini
will put a copy of the current path into the background. Alterthe appearance of the hatching by changing the background
path and applying the filter once again.

With the Origin option, you can change the position of thehatch strokes. The two fields represent the x and y values of
the construction origin. The Step Width option determines the
distance between individual strokes, and Angle their slant indegrees. The Offset Path value determines the thickness of thestrokes, much like the Offset Curve filter would. Deactivate thecheckbox next to it to prevent the offsetting, and only insert
straight, open paths as hatch lines. This may be useful in case
you plan additional subsequent transformations.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   41

4.2.2 Offset Curve
Changes the thickness of stems horizontally and / or vertically.
The lock sign uses the horizontal value for both horizontal
and vertical expansion. Without the Make Stroke option, paths
will just be moved into a parallel position:

With the Make Stroke option, selected paths will be expanded
to closed outlines:
Tip: You can apply the Make
Stroke option to an open path to
get a thickened outline. This way,
you can get an initial outline justby drawing the internal stroke.

The Position setting controls the distribution of the expansion.
At 0%, the path will only expand to the right. At 100%, thepath will only expand to the left. At 50%, the expansion will
be evenly distributed to both sides of the path. Right and left
sides are determined by the path orientation.
With the Auto Stroke option, the vertical dimensions will be
kept intact. In that case, the offset position will be assumed
at 50%.

4.2.3 Round Corners
Use this filter to round all selected corners of a path. To onlyround the outside corners, i.e., corners pointing into whitebackground, select nothing. Supply a Radius value in units.
From left to right: original shape,rounded shape, and roundedshape with visual corrections.

Use the Visual Corrections option to create a more naturalGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   42looking corner rounding. This option increases the cornerradius at obtuse angles, and reduces the radius at acute angles,
yielding a more natural shape.
4.2.4 Transformations
The window of the Transformations filter sports three tabs:
Transform, Background, and Metrics.

Use Transform to horizontally and vertically move, scale,and skew outlines. For scaling and skewing, you can set thetransformation origin to cap height, half cap-height, x-height,
half x-height, and baseline. Skew without optical correction
by activating the Slant option, or with optical correction using
the Cursify option. Cursify requires correctly set vertical andhorizontal stems in File > Font Info.

Use the slider in the Background tab to interpolate between
front and background paths. The paths need to be compatible.
This is useful if you want to experiment with a feature ofa glyph, e.g., the length of a stroke. You can quickly copy aGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   43path into the background by choosing Glyph > Selection to
Background (Cmd-K).

In the Metrics tab, you can set the width and sidebearings ofall selected letters at once. With the Relative option, the values
will be added or subtracted.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   44

5 Font View
5.1

VIEWING GLYPHS
The Font view of the main window displays the glyphs in the
font. Here, you can manage your glyph set. When mutiple tabs
are open, you can activate the Font view by clicking on thefirst tab, or pressing Cmd-Opt-1.

With the slider in the bottom right corner of the window, you
can control the zoom level of the displayed glyphs. Dependingon the zoom level, Glyphs Mini will display either the glyph
images only, or glyph images with glyph names, or, in large
zoom stages, images, names and Unicode values, if available.
The glyph cell shows some extra information about theglyph. A vertical red stripe on the left or right edge of the cell
indicates that the metric key for the respective sidebearing isout of sync (see 8.1.2, ‘Metric Keys’, p. 72). Likewise, a locksymbol indicates that the glyph has been locked and remains
uneditable until it is unlocked again (see 2.1, ‘Editing Glyphs’,p. 9). A thin red diagonal line through the glyph cell
indicates that the glyph in question is not exporting (see 5.3.4,‘Export’, p. 48). Glyphs are shown in their glyph color (see5.3.5, ‘Color Label’, p. 48). Glyphs with unsaved changes show
a slightly darker glyph cell until saved.
5.1.1



Searching for Glyphs
You can choose to view different excerpts of your glyph set
by selecting categories, languages or filters from the left
sidebar. To further narrow down your search, you can enter
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   45a search term in the search field (Cmd-F) at the bottom rightof the window. For more details, see section 5.5.1, ‘Search
Box’ (p. 50)
The three numbers to the left of the search field indicate(from left to right) how many glyphs are selected, how manyare currently displayed, and the total number of glyphs in the
font file:If you cannot see a glyph you are looking for, the current
display settings may prevent the glyph from showing. If that isthe case, first check if there is a selection in the left sidebar, or
simply click on All at the top. Also, a search term may still beentered and active in the search field. Click in the search field(Cmd-F), and clear its search string.

5.2 MANAGING THE GLYPH SET
5.2.1 Generating New Glyphs
There are several ways to add new glyphs to a font:• Glyph > New Glyph (Cmd-Opt-Shift-N) and the Plus button
at the bottom in Font view add an empty glyph called‘newGlyph’ to the font. You may need to scroll down to
see it.
• Glyph > Duplicate (Cmd-D) duplicates the currently selected
Adding glyphs through menu
commands also works inglyph(s). Because glyph names must be unique throughout
Edit view. Newly added glyphs
a font, the new glyphs will carry an incremental number aswill then be added to thename suffix, e.g., ‘.001’, ‘.002’, etc.
sample string in the current tab.
• Open Window > Glyph Info, then select one or more glyph
descriptions, and click the Add to Font button.
• 
Some entries in the sidebar of the Font view have a number
For the complete list ofrecognized glyph names,
badge, indicating the number of glyphs already createdchoose Window > Glyphs Info.
versus the total number of glyphs predefined in thatcategory, language group or filter. Right-click or Ctrl-click
the badge to get a list of all glyphs missing in this category.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   46Select one or more glyph names, or press Cmd-A to select allof them, and click Generate to add them to your font:	 5.2.2 Copying Glyphs Between Files
You can copy any number of glyphs from one file (the source)
and paste them into another file (the target). Components
will be re-linked to their respective counterparts in the target
font. If a glyph with the same name already exists in thetarget font, then the pasted glyphs will be renamed with anincreasing triple-digit suffix, e.g., ‘A.001’, ‘A.002’ etc., avoiding
data loss.
5.2.3 Removing Glyphs
In Font view, you can click the Minus button in the bottom
section of the window. Before the respective glyphs are
removed from your font, you will be asked for confirmation:

5.3

GLYPH PROPERTIES
Select one or more glyphs and, if necessary, click on thesecond button
at the bottom left of the window, and theglyph properties will be displayed.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   475.3.1 Name
The glyph name can be accessed and changed only if exactly
one glyph is selected. If you want to batch-change thenames of many selected glyphs, you can use Edit > Find >Search and Replace (Cmd-Shift-F). See section 5.6.3, ‘Renaming
Glyphs’ (p. 55) for more details.
5.3.2 Width and Sidebearings
The widths as well as the left and right sidebearings can beaccessed and changed for any number of selected glyphs at
once. Changing only the width affects the right sidebearing.
5.3.3 Kerning Groups
You can set kerning groups for a range of glyphs, see section 8,‘Spacing and Kerning’ (p. 72), for further details.
5.3.4 Export
The glyph will appear in the exported font only if this checkbox is enabled. This is useful for keeping glyph variations or
glyph components from ending up in the final font. Newly
created glyphs are set to export by default, unless their namestarts with an underscore (‘_’).
5.3.5 Color LabelFor easier sorting and filtering, or simply for keeping
oversight, you can mark glyphs with one of twelve predefinedcolors. The colors have no effect on the exported font.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   485.3.6 Unicode
The Unicode value is determined by the glyph name, whichmeans that you cannot set the value directly. Thus, thedisplayed Unicode value of glyphs is read-only. Glyphs in the
Private Use Area can always have custom names. For details,
see section 5.5.2, ‘Private Use Area’ (p. 51).

5.4 BATCH-PROCESSING
5.4.1 Selecting Glyphs
Batch-processing a number of glyphs requires a selection ofmultiple glyphs. You can select all glyphs currently displayedin Font view via Edit > Select All (Cmd-A).
5.4.2 Menu Commands
You can apply manipulations on the selected glyphs. Selectthe glyphs you want to batch-edit, and choose one ofthese commands:• Glyph > Duplicate (Cmd-D)• Glyph > Make Component Glyph (Cmd-Opt-Shift-C)• Glyph > Decompose Components (Cmd-Shift-D)• Glyph > Add Image (see 2.10, ‘Images’, p. 34)• Glyph > Update Metrics (Ctrl-Cmd-M)• Glyph > Set Anchors (Cmd-U)• Glyph > Selection to Background (Cmd-K), Edit Background,
Assign Background• Glyph > Correct Path Direction (Cmd-Shift-R)• Glyph > Reverse Contours (Cmd-Opt-Shift-R)• Glyph > Round Coordinates• Glyph > Tidy up Paths (Cmd-Opt-Shift-T)• Glyph > Add Extremes
5.4.3 Batch-Renaming Glyphs
You can search and replace in names of selected glyphs with
Edit > Find > Search and Replace (Cmd-Shift-F). It will look forthe string entered in the Find field and replace it with thestring entered in Replace. You can add characters to the end ofGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   49the names of selected glyphs if you leave the Find field empty
and enter the desired suffix in the Replace field:

5.4.4 Palette Manipulations
From the Palette (Cmd-Shift-P), you can apply the
mirroring, scaling, rotating, and skewing functions in theTransformations section on multiple selected glyphs. The
transformation origin will be respected. Also, the boolean
operations work with a multiple-glyph selection. Be careful
though, it is easy to achieve an unexpected result.

5.5 FILTERING AND SORTING
5.5.1 Search Box
The search box (Cmd-F) at the bottom right provides a way to
instantly narrow down the selection of glyphs displayed in
the Font tab. By clicking on the search symbol (the magnifying
glass) in the entry field, you can choose the following options:• All: search in glyph names, glyph notes, and Unicode values• Name: search in names only
• Unicode: search in Unicode values only
• Note: search in glyph notes only
• Match Case: if active, searches will be case-sensitive• Regex: if active, the search string will be interpreted asa regular expression
The Regex option not only activates regular expressions, butalso automatically limits the search to glyph names. Regularexpressions allow you to search for a text pattern rather thana specific text. When activated, you can use search terms like
[Lldt]caron(\..+)* to match Lcaron, lcaron, dcaron, tcaron, withor without dot suffixes. Some examples:• [abc] any of the letters a, b or c
• [^abc] any letter but a, b or c: d, e, f, g …
• . any character: a, b, c, ., -, 1, 2, 3 …
• \d any digit: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   50

• \. a literal period: .
• a? zero or one occurrence of a
• a+ one or more occurrence of a: a, aa, aaa, aaaa …
• a* zero, one or more occurrences of a• a{3} exactly three occurrences of a: aaa• a{2,5} between 2 and 5 occurrences of a: aa, aaa, aaaa, aaaa
• a.* any glyph name with a at the beginning: a, ae, aacute …
• .*a any glyph name with a at the end: a, cedilla, ccedilla …
• .+-.+ any glyph name with a hyphen in it: beh-ar, he-hb …
• .+\..+ any glyph name with a period in it: a.ss01, J.titl …
• .+\d any glyph name with a digit at the end: a.001, b.x2, c.ss02• [^\d]*\d{3} any glyph name with exactly three digits at the end,
and no digits anywhere before: a.001, x.test123 …
5.5.2 Private Use Area
In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points
that, by definition, no characters will be assigned to by theUnicode Consortium. They are intentionally left undefined sothat you may define your own characters without conflictingwith Unicode Consortium assignments.
Glyphs in the Private Use Area can always have custom
names. You first create them with a name according to theuniXXXX (for values between U+0000 and U+FFFF) or uXXXXX
scheme (for values beyond U+10000) to set their Unicodevalue, and then rename them to your liking. The usual glyph
naming restrictions still apply, though (see 5.6.2, ‘Naming
Glyphs’, p. 54). Make sure the custom name you choose is
not already reserved by another glyph in the internal glyph
database. Otherwise, the Unicode value of that specific entry
will be applied.
5.5.3 Categories
Categories give you the option to only display a predefined
subset of the glyphs you have. Click the triangle next to thecategory name to access subcategories. You can combine morethan one category by Cmd-clicking their names to display theintersection of all selected categories. You can achieve an evennarrower subset by also Cmd-clicking a Filter. For instance,
if you click the Uppercase category and then Cmd-click a
Filter, Glyphs Mini will display all uppercase characters in theselected Filter.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   51You can cancel any subset you created and return
to displaying the complete glyph set by clicking on the
All category.
5.5.4 Languages
To only display glyphs belonging to a certain script, you canclick on the name of the script in the Languages, Latin, Cyrillic,
or Greek. Clicking on the triangle next to the script namewill expand the view and give you more detailed subsetting
options. Again, you can combine subsets by subsequently
Cmd-clicking them.
5.5.5 Smart Filters

To define a query-based filter, click the gear button in thebottom left of the window and choose Add Smart Filter. Smartfilters are similar to smart playlists in iTunes. Set up thequery with any of these properties:• Color Label: the color assigned to the glyph, if any.
• Count of Paths: number of paths in the glyph.
• Export Glyph: whether the glyph exports or not.
• Glyph Name: the name of the glyph.
• Contains Component: whether the glyph contains acomponent with a specific name.
• Has Hints: whether manually placed hints are in the glyph.
• Has Metrics Keys: whether any of the glyph’s metrics
contains a formula such as ‘=n+10’.
• Has Unicode: whether the glyph has a Unicode value.
• Is Auto-Aligned: whether the glyph is automatically aligned.
• Metrics Keys Out of Sync: whether the metrics keys for theglyph are up to date or not.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   52Add additional properties by clicking on the plus button at theend of a line. By default, all properties are applied to the query(logical-and). You can add and nest logical-and (‘all of thefollowing’), logical-or (‘any of the following’) and even logicalnot (‘none of the following’) concatenations by holding down
the Option key while pressing the plus button.
5.5.6 List Filters
You can define a list of glyphs to be displayed by choosing Add
List Filter from the gear menu in the bottom left of the Fonttab. By default, currently selected glyphs are added to the list
automatically. You can subsequently edit the list or paste a listof glyph names. In Font view, once you apply a list filter, youwill see its glyphs in the order they are listed in.
5.5.7 Manage Filters
Once you have set up a couple of filters, you can apply
more than one filter by holding down the Command key
and subsequently clicking the individual Filter names. Edit
an existing filter by selecting it in the Font tab sidebar andsubsequently choosing Edit Filter from the gear menu in thebottom left. Alternatively, double click its side bar entry. A
dialog sheet will appear that allows you to edit the selected
smart or list filter. Remove an existing filter by selecting
its sidebar entry and choosing Remove Filter from the samegear menu. You can sort your filters by dragging them into
a desired order. You can also organise your filters in sidebar
folders. To add a folder, choose Add Folder from the gear menu.
To quickly change the name of a filter or folder, click to selectit, press the Return key, and type a new name.

5.6 NAMES AND UNICODE
5.6.1 Glyph Info Database
Glyphs Mini contains a glyph info database. For each glyph,
the database defines:• the human-readable (or ‘nice’) glyph name,• the production names, i.e., the name as required for theexported installable font file,• the associated Unicode value, if any,
• possible components,• default anchors, if any,Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   53For more information about the
Adobe Glyph List, see
github.com/adobetype-tools/agl-aglfn• possible accents, mainly for displaying the mark cloud
when you click on an anchor,• the script such as Latin, Cyrillic or Greek,• the category and subcategory, such as letter and uppercase,punctuation, or figure, etc.
For the ‘nice names’, Glyphs Mini employs a special naming
convention which is, for the most part, loosely based on
the Adobe Glyph List (AGL) Specification. But in the AGL,
not all glyphs have nice names. Rather, they have names
like ‘uni042F’, which are hard to memorize. In cases like
this, Glyphs Mini derives the nice name from the Unicode
description and appends a script suffix, e.g., ‘CYRILLIC CAPITALLETTER A’ becomes ‘A-cy’. For an overview of the available datastored in the glyph info database, choose Window > Glyph Info:

Typically, suffixed glyphs will inherit their glyph info
attributes from their unsuffixed counterpart. That means that,e.g., both ‘X’ and ‘X.alt.bold’ will be treated as letters, thus
enable automatic alignment and receive default anchors when
Glyph > Add Anchors is run. If you name the copy ‘Xalternate’
without the dot, it will not be recognized as a letter unless
you changed the glyph data accordingly. So, if you want tohandle glyph backups and copies in a way that Glyphs canstill semantically connect them with their originals, makesure the glyph names are the same up until the first period in
the name.
5.6.2 Naming Glyphs
The glyph name appears below the glyph in grid view, or ina separate column in List view. You can edit a glyph name byclicking once into the name. Glyphs Mini will automaticallyGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   54convert entries like ‘ä’ or ‘uni00E4’ to nice names, i.e.,‘adieresis’ in this case. Based on the glyph names, Glyphs Mini
will automatically assign Unicode values as well as Category,
Subcategory and Script attributes, and can even automaticallybuild some OpenType features. When you name or rename aglyph, three different types of input values are accepted:• the ‘nice name’, e.g., ‘Ia-cy’,• the Unicode value in hex form with a ‘uni’ or ‘u’ prefix,
e.g., ‘uni042F’ or ‘u10120’ (‘uni’ for four-digit hexadecimalcodes, ‘u’ for five- or six-digit codes),•	the actual typed character, e.g., ‘ä’, if the character is notexpected in a valid glyph name.
Except for ‘.notdef’, a valid glyph name must begin with acharacter from A-Z or a-z. A glyph name can subsequently also
contain figures (0-9), underscores (_), periods (.) or hyphens (-).
All other characters, including whitespace characters, are
not allowed. A warning will appear if you try to use invalidcharacters like space in a glyph name.
If you need variations of glyphs, extend your glyph nameswith dot suffixes, like ‘n.sc’ for a small cap n, or ‘five.numr’
for a numerator five. Some suffixes will be used by Glyphs
Mini to automatically build OpenType feature code. See theappendix of this manual for a list of recognized suffixes. To
name ligatures, the names of the parts need to be joinedwith an underscore, e.g., ‘f_f_l’ for an ffl ligature. Hyphens
are used to indicate the script a glyph belongs to, e.g., ‘em-cy’
for an Cyrillic em. In ligatures, the script suffix is appended
only once, e.g., em_em-cy.
You can copy the names of selected glyphs into the
clipboard by opening the submenu Copy Glyph Names in thecontext menu.

Exception: names of nonexporting glyphs can also
start with an underscore.

5.6.3 Renaming Glyphs
You can rename any glyph by simply clicking in its namefield and editing the name as desired. Keep in mind that if
you change the name before the first period, its glyph info
attribution will be changed as well. This means that Unicodevalue, category, subcategory, script, default anchors andaccents, as well as default decomposition may change.
For searching and replacing in glyph names, or batchrenaming a large number of glyphs at once, see section 5.4.3,‘Batch-Renaming Glyphs’ (p. 49).
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   55

6 Font Info

Open the Font Info tab by choosing File > Font Info (Cmd-I),
or by clicking on the Info button in the top left corner of themain window:

6.1

FAMILY AND STYLE NAMES
The family name, displayed in large letters at the left, is how
the font family will appear in the font menu. Fonts with thesame family name will be grouped in the same submenu. You
can use uppercase, lowercase, and spaces in the font name, but
non-ASCII characters prevent the font from exporting.
The style name (or subfamily name) of the font, displayedon the right, differentiates it from other members of the same
font family, e.g., ‘Regular’ or ‘Bold’.

6.2 METRICS
Setting the metrics sets the guiding lines in Edit view, andprepares the font for hinting.
The Cap Height is the distance from the baseline to theheight of the caps, not counting the overshoots. Typically, theheight of the uppercase H is a good reference.
The x-Height is the distance from the baseline to the heightof the lowercase letters without ascenders, not counting theovershoots. Typically, the height of the lowercase x is a goodreference, hence the name.
The Ascender is the distance from the baseline to theheight of the lowercase letters with ascenders, not counting
the overshoots. Lowercase letters with ascenders include b,Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   56d, f, h, k, and l. The lowercase t usually does not rise to theascender, but stops halfway between x-height and ascender inmost designs.
The Descender is the distance from the baseline to thedepth of the lowercase letters with descenders, not counting
the overshoots, and expressed as a negative number since itreaches below the baseline. Lowercase letters with descenders
include g, j, p, q, and y. Also, cursive designs of the lowercase f
often reach the descender line.
For a description of Vertical and Horizontal Stems, see below,
section 6.3, ‘Stems and Alignment Zones’ (p. 57).
The Italic Angle will slant the help lines in Edit view aroundhalf the x-height. All sidebearing and kerning measurements
respect the italic angle. In the exported font, this value will
determine the italicAngle property in the post table as well as
caretOffset and caretSlopeRun in the hhea table.

For more info about OpenTypetables such as post and hhea,
see www.microsoft.com/
typography/otspec/otff.htm

6.3

STEMS AND ALIGNMENT ZONES
If you enter good average values for your standard stems, i.e.,
Horizontal Stems and Vertical Stems, the autohinter will findthose stems in your letters and put a stem hint on them.
Alignment Zones help create an even vertical alignment at low
resolutions through overshoot suppression. The values entered
here are crucial for the autohinting process when the font isbeing exported. An alignment zone must encompass anythingthat should later be aligned at a low resolution. For a detailed
discussion, see section 9.2, ‘Font-Wide Hints’ (p. 77).
After you have set the Metrics properly, you can click thegrey circle to let Glyphs Mini find the alignment zones for you.
Glyphs Mini will then reduplicate the heights of the vertical
metrics you entered in the Metrics field as the positions of thezones. It will try to guess the size of the alignment zones bymeasuring certain key glyphs in the font:• for the ascender zone, it will take the height of the lowercase
f plus one unit,• for the cap zone, the height of the uppercase O plus one unit,• for the small cap zone, the height of ‘o.sc’ plus one unit,• for the x-height zone, it will measure the lowercase o, andadd one unit,• the baseline zone defaults to −15,
• and for the descender zone, Glyphs Mini takes the depth ofthe lowercase g plus one unit.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   57If Glyphs Mini cannot find any glyphs to measure, the sizes
for top zones default to 16, and to −16 for bottom zones. It is agood idea to double check if all your important glyphs reach
into, but not beyond, the alignment zones.

6.4 DESIGNER AND DESIGNER URL
Here, you can enter your name and a URL (including theprotocol, e.g., http:// or ftp://), for example:• Designer: Jessica Doe• Designer URL: http://www.example.com/
You can check if the URL was entered correctly by clicking on
the arrow next to the text entry field. Glyphs Mini will open
the URL in your web browser.

6.5 MANUFACTURER AND MANUFACTURER URL
Here, you can enter name and URL (including the protocol,
e.g., http:// or ftp://) of your font vendor, for example:• Manufacturer: Sample Font Store• Manufacturer URL: http://www.example.com/
You can check if the URL was entered correctly by clicking on
the arrow next to the text entry field. The URL will then be
opened in your web browser.

6.6 VERSION
Glyphs Mini derives the Version String from the Version entry.
In the resulting font file, built-in production tools like makeotf
also leave their traces in the version string, e.g., ‘Version
1.010;PS 001.010;hotconv 1.0.70;makeotf.lib2.5.58329’.

6.7

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
The Copyright is a simple copyright notice. Click the update
button (the circled arrow) next to it to have Glyphs Mini
fill it in automatically, based on the entry in the Designer
field. According to the specification, the License is supposed
to be a ‘description of how the font may be legally used, ordifferent example scenarios for licensed use. This field should
be written in plain language, not legalese.’ However, somefoundries paste the complete text of their license agreement
in here.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   58

6.8 STYLE LINKING
You can style-link the font to another font with the samefamily name by choosing Bold and/or Italic and typing thestyle name of the referenced font. This enables the Bold and
Italic functions of word processing software such as TextEdit,
Pages and Microsoft Word. Typical style relations are as
follows:• Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Extrabold, Heavy: nostyle linking, i.e., leave all options blank,• Bold: Bold of Regular,• Italic: Italic of Regular,• Bold Italic: Bold and Italic of Regular,• Other italics: Italic of their respective upright style, e.g.,
Medium Italic is the Italic of Medium.

6.9 WEIGHT AND WIDTHThe Weight and Width options are stored as weight class andwidth class in the exported font, and influence the menu
order of fonts in Adobe applications. More condensed fontscome before more extended fonts, and secondly, lighter fonts
appear before bolder fonts in the font family submenus. If
both weight and width properties are the same, the fonts
are sorted alphabetically. This only applies to Adobe menus;
Windows applications do not have font family submenus, andApple submenu sorting is based on undisclosed heuristics andtherefore ignores the values entered here.

6.10 GRID SPACING AND SUBDIVISIONThe Grid Spacing entry consists of two values: the Grid Step
before the slash, and the Subdivision after the slash.
The Grid Step value defines how coordinates get rounded.
Standard is the value 1. When set to zero, a grid spacing of
1/100 is assumed. This is useful if you want to keep veryfine details, e.g., after applying the Hatch Outlines filter or indetailed dingbat fonts, or if you plan to scale your glyphs andwant to minimize rounding errors. Higher values are helpfulwhen creating a modular design or a pixel font. The Pixel tool(T) uses the Grid Step value to determine the grid it applies
for posiztioning the pixel components. For more details, seesection 2.2.3, ‘Pixel Tool’ (p. 10).
The Subdivision value gives you the option to subdivide
the Grid Step if you need finer steps but want the larger gridContrary to popular belief,
decimal coordinates canbe exported into CFFs.



Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   59

spacing as design orientation or as pixel grid for the Pixel
tool. The value indicates into how many compartments themain grid is subdivided, e.g., a Grid Step value of 100 and a
Subdivision value of 5 will yield a subgrid with a 20 units step.
Setting Grid Step to 1 and Subdivision to 10 will give all yourpoint coordinates one decimal.
All tools and all modifications will consequently snap to thegrid determined by Grid Step divided by Subdivision. Regardlessof the grid settings, you can round all point coordinates of
selected nodes or glyphs to integer numbers by choosing
Glyph > Round Coordinates.

6.11 UNITS PER EM
Number of units per em (UPM), 1000 is the default. One em is
equivalent to the font size. You can use the value to adjust theapparent size of your font relative to others. Choose a smaller
UPM to make your font appear larger at the same numerical
font size, and a larger UPM to make it appear smaller.
Increasing the UPM value can improve the representationof subtle details. The OpenType specification allows values
between 16 and 16,384, but values greater than 5000 can leadto problems in InDesign and Illustrator. Problems have beenreported for other applications starting at 3000 UPM. Someapplications expect a UPM value of 1000. Also, point coordinate
values must not exceed ± 32,768, and glyph widths can beproblematic beyond ± 4096. It is therefore recommended toleave it 1000, or at least not deviate far from it.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   60

7 Reusing Shapes
7.1

COMPONENTS
Displayed as a grey glyph inside another glyph, components arean efficient way to re-use the shapes of glyphs inside multiple
other glyphs. The main purpose of components is their use
inside diacritic variations of the base letter, e.g., A in Ä, Ă, Ā, Á,À, Â, and Å.
The original, usually outlined, glyph that the component
points back to, is referred to as the ‘base glyph’ of thatcomponent. A glyph built with components is usually referred
to as ‘compound’ or ‘composite glyph’. Since the component
always stays in sync with its base glyph, you only need tochange the original outline, and the changes will be visible
in all composites. Components are converted into plain outlines
before exported in OpenType/CFF fonts, since CFF does notproperly support components.

7.1.1

Building Compounds
You can build compound glyphs by either creating a glyphwith the proper name, e.g., ‘aacute’, or by selecting existing
glyphs and choosing Glyph > Make Component Glyph (Cmd-OptShift-C) to rebuild the glyph as a composite with its default
recipe. Glyphs Mini will use a built-in database of glyph
compositions to determine the components of the glyph inquestion. You can add components yourself to an existing
glyph by choosing Glyph > Add Component (Cmd-Shift-C) andpicking the base glyph in the subsequent dialog.
If you already have a letter that you want to turn into acomponent-based glyph, you can force the composition with
Glyph > Make Component Glyph. The content of the letter will
be deleted and rebuilt from scratch, then. This only works if
the base glyphs of the individual components already exist in
the font.

7.1.2

Turning Paths into Components
If the base glyphs are not already present in the font, you cancreate a new component from an existing path by selecting
the path you want to turn into a component and picking
Component from Selection from the context menu. Glyphs Mini

While multiple glyphs are
selected, you can add thesame component to all
those glyphs at once, using
the same menu command.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   61will then suggest a name for the base glyph based on thedecomposition information from the built-in glyph database:Once you confirm the dialog, Glyphs Mini will create a newglyph containing the selected path and place it as a component
in the original glyph.
7.1.3

Tip: Edit > Select All (Cmd-A)
selects all paths, but ignores
anchors and components.
Selecting all twice in a row(hold down Cmd while you
type A twice) also selects
anchors and components.

Editing Components
Select a component by clicking on it. Press the Tab key toselect the next, or Shift-Tab to select the previous component.
Rectangular mouse selections ignore components, unless you
simultaneously hold down the Option key.
The grey Info box will display component information:
the name of the original glyph the component points to, its
position, scale, and rotation. Open the original glyph by either
double clicking the component or clicking on the arrow next
to the glyph name. Change the component by clicking on its
name. Glyphs Mini will prompt you for the new glyph thecomponent should point to.

You can edit component attributes by changing the values in
the grey Info box, or by applying transformations from theTransformations Palette, such as aligning, scaling, rotating, andmirroring. Flipping mark components both horizontally andvertically will switch their top and bottom anchor association.
I.e., a flipped top mark will attach to a bottom anchor and viceversa. This can, for example, be useful for reusing the bottom
mark commaccentcomb in gcommaaccent (i.e., instead of using
the default commaabovecomb), where the comma accent is
supposed to reside on top of the g.
You can move a selected component with the mouse or
the arrow keys if it is not automatically aligned. Hold down
the Shift key for increments of 10, and the Command key forGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   62

increments of 100. Option-drag a component to duplicate it.
Delete it by simply pressing the Delete or Backspace key.

7.1.4

Moving between Base Glyphs and Compounds
To edit the base glyph of a component, double click thecomponent and Glyphs Mini will place the original letter
next to the compound glyph, and activate it for immediate
editing. Alternatively, you can select the component inside thecomposite glyph and click the arrow symbol that appears in
the gray Info box (Cmd-Shift-I).
Placeholders can indicate an ‘empty base glyph’, ‘no baseglyph’, or a ‘bad reference’. An empty base glyph is a base glyph
without paths or components. Double clicking its placeholder
will open the empty glyph next to the current glyph, so you
can edit it right away. ‘No base glyph’ means that the glyph thecomponent is referring to does not exist in the font. Double
click the placeholder to create the glyph, and insert it in the
Edit tab, next to the current glyph. A ‘bad reference’ indicatesa broken component reference, e.g., a circular reference, i.e.,a component that points to the compound glyph in which
it resides.

You can see in which compounds a glyph is used as acomponent by right-clicking or Ctrl-clicking on the glyphin Edit view to open its context menu, and choosing Show
all glyphs that use this glyph as a component. All glyphs that
contain a component pointing back to the base letter will
be inserted next to it in the Edit tab. This command is alsoavailable in the context menu of placed components. All othercompounds containing the same component will be inserted
next to the current glyph.
7.1.5



Anchors
In mark compounds, accents are snapped into place if
corresponding anchors are placed in both the base letter andthe original mark. The letter needs an anchor (e.g., ‘top’), andthe mark needs a corresponding mark anchor, i.e., an anchor
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   63with the same name, but preceded by a leading underscore(e.g., ‘_top’). In the composite, the mark will then be positioned
according to the relative anchor positions.
For many glyphs, default anchors are predefined in thebuilt-in glyph database. They can be added to selected glyphs
with Glyph > Set Anchors (Cmd-U). Setting anchors also works
for multiple glyphs. You can add custom anchors by choosing
Add Anchor from the context menu. You will immediately
be prompted for a name. Enter an ASCII-only name without
whitespace and confirm by pressing Return. You can change
the name of an existing anchor either by selecting it andpressing Return, or by double clicking it. Then, you can starttyping the new name:

Select an anchor in the base glyph to get a preview of the mostcommon accents that may attach to this glyph. Similarly,
select an anchor in the mark glyph and this accent is shownon all other glyphs in the same Edit view. If exactly one
anchor is selected, press the Tab key to select the next anchor,or Shift-Tab to go to the previous anchor. Change the positionof an anchor by dragging it with the mouse, or selecting
it and pressing the arrow keys. Add Shift or Command forincrements of 10 or 100 units, respectively. Delete selectedanchors by pressing the Delete key. Select an anchor andtwo points and choose Glyph > Align Selection (Cmd-Shift-A)
to horizontally center the anchor between the points.
Again, Glyphs Mini will respect the italic angle set in File >Font Info (Cmd-I).
Sometimes you need more than one ‘top’ anchor, e.g., inligatures, or for fine-tuning positions of certain marks, or incircumflexcomb for different positions where marks can attach
in Vietnamese double accents. Multiple anchors of the samekind need to be underscore-suffixed, e.g., ‘top_1’ and ‘top_2’, or
something more descriptive such as ‘top_viet’ or ‘top_acute’.
If you apply this naming scheme, you can choose a different
anchor for a component by selecting it, clicking on the anchor
symbol in the Info Box, and choosing an alternative anchor
from the pop-up menu. The anchor symbol becomes visibleGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   64

if there is more than one anchor that fits the currently
selected component:

7.1.6



Automatic Alignment
Letters built entirely from components, so-called compound orcomposite glyphs, can make use of automatic alignment. Thismeans that both the placement of the components inside thecompound, and the width of the compound are determined by
the base glyphs and their anchors.
Single letters (‘component copies’): If the base glyph is of thecategory ‘Letter’, the resulting compound will be automaticallyaligned with the base letter, inheriting its positioning andside bearings.
Letters with accents (‘mark compounds’): If the firstcomponent points to a ‘Letter’ glyph, and the following
components point to ‘Mark’ glyphs, the resulting compound
will be automatically aligned with the base letter, and themarks will be automatically placed according to corresponding
marks in the original glyphs.
Multiple letters (‘compound ligatures’), with or without
marks: The automatic placement of the letters takes both theglyph widths and their kerning into account. For example,
when building a onehalf fraction out of one.numr, fraction,and two.dnom, the fraction will look as if its parts were typed
individually. To move them to a different position, you caneither space and kern the individual glyphs, or you can disable
the automatic alignment of a component via the context
menu (see further below).
Non-letters are not automatically aligned. This, forinstance, allows to re-use proportional figures for tabular
figures or vice versa. Also, automatic alignment of components
is disabled as soon as there are any paths in the glyph. Once
those paths are removed again, the components will snap
back into automatic alignment. To explicitly disable automaticalignment of a component, Ctrl- or right-click on a component,
and choose Disable Automatic Alignment from its context menu.
You can disable automatic alignment for the base, but keep it
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   65for the subsequent marks. Thus, you can move the compoundand change its width, while the marks still stay aligned tothe base.
7.1.7

Locking Components
For components that cannot or should not be automaticallyaligned, there is the option to lock them in their current
position. To do that, select a component, and pick Lock
Component from its context menu. Locked components
cannot be selected, preventing accidental shifts. To unlock
a component again, right click or Ctrl-click it to bring up its
context menu, and choose Unlock Component.

7.1.8

Component Colors
Placed components indicate their status with their color.
An auto-aligned component shows a subtle green, a lockedcomponent is displayed in a subdued blue, while a freely
placed, unlocked and unaligned component sports a
simple grey:

7.1.9

Decomposing
You can turn all components inside a glyph into editable
paths by choosing Glyph > Decompose Components (CmdShift-D). All components in the current glyph will be
removed, and its paths and anchors will be inserted instead.
Nested components will be decomposed as well. Selecting
Decompose from the context menu of a specific component
only decomposes the selected component. In this case, nested
components will not be decomposed.

From left to right: autoaligned, locked, andunaligned components.

7.1.10 Combining Paths and Components
As soon as there is a path in the glyph, automatic alignment
is disabled. Therefore, be careful when combining components
and paths, because shifts may occur, especially if the baseglyph of the component is changed. If you want to prevent
shifts, consider rebuilding the glyph with components andanchors, thus enabling automatic alignment.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   66While dragging an object over a placed component, vector
points of the component become highlighted. Nodes dragged
above a component snap to the compound nodes. You canalign a component with an outline node by selecting both andchoosing Glyph > Align Selection. While the outline node stays
put, the component will be moved above the point so that theorigin of the component will be aligned with the node. The
origin is the point in the component glyph where the left side
bearing intersects with the baseline, or, if present, the positionof an anchor named ‘origin’. This can be useful for placing
serif components.
7.1.11 Nesting Components
Glyphs Mini allows you to nest components. For example, you
can build the dieresiscomb glyph out of two dotaccentcombcomponents. Subsequently, you can use this compound
dieresiscomb in higher-level compounds such as adieresis (ä).
Anchors will shine through in nested components, unlessthey are overridden by a specific anchor placement in a higher
compound in the nesting chain. That means that you do notneed to reset anchors in nesting components. E.g., if you arebuilding oslashacute from oslash and acutecomb, and oslash
is composed of o and slashlongcomb, then the acutecomb
can reuse the ‘top’ anchor of the o. You do not need to set
another ‘top’ anchor in oslash, unless you do want a different
mark placement.
7.1.12 Preferred Marks for Glyph Composition
When automatically building compounds, Glyphs Mini
will prefer marks that carry the same name suffix as thecompound. For instance, when composing adieresis.sc, Glyphs
Mini will prefer dieresiscomb.sc to dieresiscomb, if it isavailable in the font.
For building compound uppercase letters, marks with a
special ‘.case’ suffix are preferred. E.g., Glyphs Mini will preferdieresiscomb.case over dieresiscomb for Odieresis (Ö).
Tip: You can see the default
compositions of compounds
When building combinations for i and j, make sure bothin the Components column
idotless and jdotless are in your font. This is because the dot isof Window > Glyph Info.
typically not included when i and j receive accent marks. For i
and j diacritics, Glyphs Mini will prefer marks carrying a ‘.i’ or‘.narrow’ suffix.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   67

7.1.13 Underscore Components
If you are adding glyphs to your font that are not supposed
to appear in the compiled font, but are solely used as parts inother letters, then it is advisable to prefix their names withan underscore character, e.g., _leftBottomSerif. This simplifies
finding such glyphs through, for instance, a Smart Filter (see5.5.5, ‘Smart Filters’, p. 52), or the Search function (see 5.5.1,‘Search Box’, p. 50). When glyphs are generated with theComponent from Selection function with a preceding underscorein their name, they will be created with the Export option off.

7.2

CORNER AND CAP COMPONENTS

7.2.1

Corner Components
Corner components are open path fragments that can be
dynamically fitted into an outline. The main purpose forcorner components is to facilitate the construction andmanagement of serifs.
In order to set up a corner component, you need to createa glyph with a name that starts with ‘_corner’, followed byan arbitrary dot suffix, e.g., _corner.leftSerif. Inside the glyph,
you draw an outline around the origin point, or, alternatively,around an anchor named ‘origin’. Optional ‘left’ and ‘right’anchors control the amount of distortion for adjusting thepath fragment to fit into the receiving path:

Tip: employing both left
and right anchors in thecorner component allows
building of cupped serifs..

The path direction, as indicated by the arrowhead at the open
start point, should match the orientation of the intended
target paths. That means that if you are constructing a lower
left serif, your serif path should start at the top point, bendaround the origin, and end in the lower right point. To changeGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   68the path direction, select the path, and choose Reverse Selected
Contours from the context menu.
Once you are done with the corner component glyph, you
can then proceed to insert the corner component into theoutline of another glyph. To achieve this, select exactly one
corner node in the outline of the glyph, and choose Add Cornerfrom its context menu. The path fragment will immediately
be bent into the corner, and also adapted to the slant of its
surrounding outline segments.

You can press the Delete or Backspace key to remove it, you
can copy the corner component into your clipboard and paste
it on another node, or you can change its settings in the gray
Info box. Via the Info box, you can switch to the original
corner component glyph by clicking on the little arrowsymbol. You can change which corner component is used byclicking on the name, as well as the scale, and the alignmentof the corner component. The alignment controls which sideof the corner component stays put while the other side gets
bent into the outline of the target path. You can have a cornercomponent:•  left-aligned, i.e., aligned with the stroke the entrance
point is put upon, and the exit stroke stays put, which istypically what you want for a lower left or top right serif;•  right-aligned, i.e., aligned with the stroke the exit point
is put upon, end the entry stroke stays put, which isusually what you want for top left or bottom right serifs;•  center-aligned, i.e., rotated between both alignments, soneither entry nor exit stroke stays put, which makes sense
for ink traps and the like.
Generally, the presence of ‘left’, ‘right’ and ‘origin’ anchors, theopen path direction, and the alignment setting determine
the rotation and positioning of the corner component on
the target path. For simple serifs, you can influence theadjustment and positioning of the curve in slanted stems, forinstance, when you need to control how far a serif can stickout horizontally at the end of a slanted stem. To do that, add
an anchor called ‘left’ or ‘right’ precisely above the origin. Pick‘left’ for a left-aligned corner component, ‘right’ for a right

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   69

Tip: the quickest way to mirror
a corner component is to selectit and press the mirror buttons
in the Transformations palette.

aligned one, or both for a center-aligned corner component or
cupped serif. The distance between the origin and the anchor
controls the amount of adjustment: Moving it up will shorten
the corner components on an acute position, and elongate
it on a blunt one. Moving it down will achieve the opposite.
Cornered slab serifs (as opposed to bracketed serifs) willneed these anchors exactly on the joint between vertical andhorizontal segments.
If your design permits it, you can mirror cornercomponents and reuse them on the opposite side. I.e., you
can reuse a left serif on a right corner if you set its horizontal
scale to −100%.
To decompose a path with corner components into its
calculated state, you can remove overlaps by choosing Glyph >Remove Overlap (Shift-Cmd-O).

7.2.2 Cap Components
Cap components work very much like corner components
except that they connect to two adjacent nodes rather than asingle one. The idea behind cap components is that they canbe used for spurs, finials, or head serifs like on the top of alowercase u.

originIn order to create a cap component, generate a glyph with aname that starts with an underscore, followed by ‘cap’ and an
arbitrary dot suffix, e.g., _cap.headSerif. Draw an open patharound the origin point, with the connecting ends coming out
on or above the baseline, i.e., a head serif would need to be
drawn flipped (turned 180°) and on the baseline. Put the entry
point of the open path on or above the origin. If necessary,change the path direction by selecting the open path andchoosing Reverse Selected Contours from its context menu.
Again, the origin can be the origin point of the glyph, i.e.,Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   70

where the baseline intersects with the left sidebearing, or it
can be an anchor called ‘origin’.
In a target glyph, select exactly two adjacent nodes, e.g.,
the top nodes of the rectangle representing a stem. From thecontext menu, you can now choose Add Cap. The application
will present a list of all available ‘_cap’ glyphs. Pick the one
you want and click the Select button or press the Return
key to confirm the dialog. The cap component will get bent
into the receiving shape according to its position relative tothe baseline. Cap components work best if the two receiving
nodes have the same horizontal distance as the two end nodesof the open path inside the cap.
You can control the way the cap component is adapted tothe target path by clicking on the gray selection knob, andchoosing options in the gray Info box. You can change thescale by entering a new percentage value for the vertical or
horizontal scale. The Fit option scales the cap horizontally sothat the open ends fit on to the two nodes of the target path.
The option will disable the horizontal scale value. Changealignment by clicking on the alignment symbols. Aligning to
the left or right will orient the cap component to one side of
the receiving path and take positions of the ‘left’ and ‘right’anchors into account. The position of both ‘left’ and ‘right’anchors, vertically relative to the baseline and horizontally
relative to the start and end points, determines how the cap
component is bent onto the receiving nodes of the target path.

To change the cap component, click on the name in the
Info box, and choose a different one in the following dialog.
To open the cap component for editing, click on the little
arrow symbol.
To decompose all cap components present in the current
glyph, choose Glyph > Remove Overlap (Cmd-Shift-O). To remove
a cap component from an outline, select it by clicking on its
gray knob, and press Delete or Backspace.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   71

8 Spacing and Kerning
8.1

SPACING
Spacing is the process of adjusting the sidebearings of eachletter to achieve an even rhythm in a line of text. There are no
fixed rules for adjusting the white space. However, unless you
are working on a monospaced font, similar or same shapes
should have the same side bearing, e.g., the D will usually
have the same LSB as the H, but its RSB closer to or the sameas in the uppercase O.

‘LSB’ stands for the left, ‘RSB’ forthe right sidebearing of a glyph.

8.1.1
Easy to memorize: the Ctrl key
is located on the left, the Cmd
key on the right. The keys areassociated with the left andright sidebearing, respectively.

Spacing Shortcuts
There are keyboard shortcuts to change the spacing of thecurrent letter in Text mode (shortcut T). Hold down the Ctrl
key and use the left and right arrow keys to change the LSB.
Cmd and arrow keys change the RSB. Hold down both Ctrl
and Cmd keys to change both LSB and RSB simultaneously,
effectively moving the glyph inside its width. Add the Shift
key to manipulate in increments of 10 units.
The shortcuts for changing the LSB collide withdefault shortcuts for switching between macOS Spaces.
You can change or deactivate the Spaces shortcuts in the
System Preferences.

8.1.2 Metric Keys
In order to link metrics between glyphs, you can use so-called
metric keys instead of mere numeric metric values. Put thename of the glyph you want to link to in the respective side
bearing or width field and it will automatically adopt the side
bearing or width of the linked glyph. Note that keyed metrics
are not kept in sync automatically. You need to select theglyphs that need updates and select Glyph > Update Metrics(Ctrl-Cmd-M). Or update by clicking in one of the metric fields
in the Info box and then clicking somewhere else.

You can even enter simple calculations into the sidebearing
field. Calculations need to start with an equals sign (=). For
instance, ‘=n+10’ will take the same sidebearing of n andGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   72add 10 units, ‘=n-10’ subtracts 10 units, ‘=g/2’ yields half
the sidebearing of g, and ‘=v*2’ doubles the sidebearing of v.
Simply ‘=n’ has the same effect as writing ‘n’ into the field.
And equating with a number, e.g., ‘=20’, allows to update toa predefined width or sidebearing. This can be useful for amonospaced font where the width of all glyphs must be thesame, or for a connecting script font where the sidebearings
must stay at a fixed value.
Use the pipe character (|, Shift-backslash on a U.S. keyboard,
Opt-7 on a German keyboard, Opt-1 on a Spanish keyboard) toreference the opposite sidebearing. E.g., in the LSB of u, you
can enter ‘=|n’ to use the RSB of n for the LSB of u.

8.2 KERNING
If the spacing has been done properly, most glyphs fit wellnext to each other. But some glyph pairs still need specificadjustments. Usually, glyphs with a lot of white space areproblematic. E.g., V before A, L before W, or T in combination
with an unaccented lowercase letter like o will look like there
is too much space between them. This is where kerning comes
into play. Kerning is the adjustment (increasing or decreasing)of distance between two specific letters.
8.2.1 Ways to Kern
To define these kerning pairs, switch to the Text tool
(shortcut T), type both glyphs in the Edit view and place thecursor between them. The left field (labeled Kerning) in the
Info box will show the kerning value for the combination of
the previous glyph with the active glyphs. On the opposite endof the Info box, the Kerning field shows the kerning value forthe combination of the active glyph with the following one.
Just click and type a value there.

Or use the keyboard shortcuts for much greater convenience.
Ctrl-Opt-arrow keys changes the kerning towards the letter on
the left side of the current letter, while Opt-Cmd-arrow keys
change the kerning with the letter following on the right. Add
the Shift key for increments of 10.

Tip: Again, Ctrl (to the left of
the Option key) corresponds tothe left side of the glyph, Cmd
on the right to the right side.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   73

8.2.2 Kerning Groups
Many glyphs look similar and need the same kerning values.
Kerning groups capture these similarities and help you reduce
the number of pairs that need to be set manually. Kerningthen applies not just to pairs of glyphs, but of groups ofglyphs. This way, you can not only kern A and T with eachother, but all accented A and T glyphs as well, given that they
all reside in the same groups.
In Glyphs Mini, kerning classes are not edited as glyph lists.
Instead, the class membership is defined as a glyph property.
For example, put O in the left kerning group field for all glyphs
that look like an O on the left (like C, Ccedilla, G, Odieresis, andO itself). Add a value to each glyph, even if it remains the only
glyph in its group.

The small extra panel on the left of the Info box displays
kerning info for the glyph to the left of the cursor: It shows
the name of the left glyph, its group lock for the current pair,
and its kerning group at the bottom.
You can introduce exceptions to group kerning by opening
the group locks in the gray Info box. Thus you can havedifferent kerning pairs for ‘To’ and ‘Tö’, for example. Close agroup lock to remove the kerning exception for that glyph.
Within one pair, the kerning can be an exception for one glyphwhile it applies to the whole group for the other glyph. E.g. thekerning value defined for ‘Tö’ can be an exception for ö, since
it does not apply to the other o glyphs. Thus, for ö, the (left)
lock is open. However, the value does apply to all T’s including
variations like Ť or Ț. So, for T, the lock remains closed.
8.2.3 Finding and Viewing Kerning Pairs
The Kerning window (Window > Kerning ) lists all available
kerning pairs, sorted by the first glyph or glyph class of thepairs. Groups are marked with an at sign, e.g. ‘@A’ for the A
kerning group, and displayed in dark blue. Individual glyphs
are displayed in a softer beige. If the currently selected paircontains a group, you can choose Show All Glyphs from theGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   74gear menu to insert all possible glyph combinations for thecurrent groups in the front-most Edit tab.
The search field on top of the Kerning window allows you tonarrow down the displayed pairs. Clicking on the magnifying
glass symbol gives you additional options, such as searching
only for one side, only for groups or glyphs etc.
8.2.4 Deleting Kerning Pairs
In the Kerning window (Window > Kerning, Cmd-Opt-K),
clicking on the minus button in the bottom left corner deletes
all selected kerning pairs. For the current glyph pair (i.e., theglyphs to the left and right of the cursor), you can simply
delete the kerning value in the grey Info box (Cmd-Shift-I).
8.2.5 Cleaning up Kerning
After removing glyphs or after importing, invalid or
impossible kerning pairs may be left over. You can remove
them with the Clean Up function from the gear button in the
Kerning window.
8.2.6 Compressing Kerning
If you have kerned a few glyphs with each other before
having set kerning groups, you can convert the singleton
kerning pairs into group kerning with the Compress functionof the gear button in the Kerning window. The function will
delete the kerning between individual glyphs, and recreate
it with their respective kerning groups wherever possible.
Compressing kerning will keep explicit kerning exceptions
that differ from the group kerning, but will remove exceptions
that have the same value as corresponding group kernings.
You may need to repeat the compressing process in order tocatch singletons.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   759 Hinting
9.1

WHAT IS HINTING?
Hinting is a method to improve display at low resolutions.
The eventual picture on the screen (the rendering) is createdby software called the rasterizer. For fonts that are PostScriptbased, such as the ones created by Glyphs Mini, the rasterizer
needs to be relatively ‘smart’, because the fonts are said tobe rather ‘dumb’. But we can place ‘hints’ in the font, which
the rasterizer can use to improve the rendering. The goal isa sharper, more consistent pixel image at low resolutions.
To this end, the outlines will be distorted to achieve a better
fitting on the pixel grid. In other words, hinting does notpreserve shapes, on the contrary. If you have a font where
the preservation of the shape is more important than a crisp
pixel image, such as in connecting script typefaces and in icon
fonts, hinting does not make sense. It only works if the font
has repeated regular features. If the font is very irregular,
like many handwritten, ornamental and grunge fonts, thenhinting cannot improve the rendering.

If your font is intended foruse in environments where
hinting information is ignored,
like displays with a very
high resolution, or on Apple
hardware with modern versionsof macOS or iOS, then hinting
will only make the font filelarger. In cases like these, it isadvisable to not hint the font.

can be hinted

cannot be hinted

cannot be hinted

With PostScript hinting, the stems as well as the heights of
the letters will appear more consistent in apps that support
hinting. For example, this is what a sample text looks like in
InDesign without hinting:

And this is what the same font in the same app would look
like with hinting:Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   769.2 FONT-WIDE HINTS
Hinting revolves around determining which part of a letter
is a necessary stroke element and should not be omitted insmall sizes. In order to achieve this, there are two kinds ofhints. Firstly, general information that applies to the entire
font. This is referred to as ‘font-level hints’ or ‘font-wide hints’,and encompasses standard stems and alignment zones (see 6.3,
‘Stems and Alignment Zones’, p. 57).
Measure the widths of your vertical and horizontal stems
and arches and in the Font Info tab (File > Font Info, Cmd-I)
enter them in the fields for Vertical Stems and Horizontal
Stems, respectively. Horizontal stems are the thicknesses of
the crossbars of lowercase e and uppercase A, and the heightof the serifs. A vertical stem is the width of the stem of alowercase n or an uppercase H, or the vertical parts of an
uppercase O. Take as few values as possible, and merge values
that are close to each other into one value. In the end you
should have at most two H and two V values, if possible only
one. Use more than one value only if it is acceptable that therespective stems are displayed with a huge difference at small
screen sizes, e.g., with one and with two pixels, respectively,
which amounts to a 100% difference.
Alignment zones take two values: a position and a size.
The position is the vertical height of the zone, usually thevertical metrics, like x-height or ascender. The position issometimes also referred to as the ‘flat edge’ of a zone. The sizeis the thickness of the maximum overshoot that may appear
at that position. If the overshoot extends above the position(e.g., x-height, small cap height, cap height, ascender), thesize value must be positive. Such zones are referred to as ‘topzones’. If, however, the overshoots extend below the position(e.g., baseline, descender), the size must be negative and wecall them ‘bottom zones’.
A typical alignment zone
setup: top zones with positive
widths at ascender, capheight and x-height; bottom
zones with negative widths
at baseline and descender.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   77Alignment zones should be as small as possible, so do not
try to make them larger ‘to be on the safe side’. In any event,a zone must not be larger than 25 units. You can have amaximum of 5 top zones and 6 bottom zones. Zones must
not overlap. There must be a minimum distance of one unit
between them, the larger the better. The baseline zone musthave a position value of zero.
If the font-wide parameters, i.e., alignment zones andstandard stems, are set properly, you can let the autohinting
algorithm do its magic by simply activating the Autohint
option in the File > Export dialog.

If your Grid Spacing settings
amount to a grid finer than
1 unit, e.g., 1/10, 5/20, or 0/1,
consider expanding your zones
by one unit into both directions.
E.g., change a zone at position
500, size 12 to position 499,
size 14. The baseline zone mustremain at position zero, though.

9.3

GLYPH-LEVEL HINTS
The implementation of PostScript hinting in Glyphs Mini
allows manual and automatic hints inside the same font.
So, before resorting to manually inserting hints into yourglyphs, we recommend to try to get as far as possible with
autohinting. Only glyphs that do not display properly at
low resolutions will need manual intervention. Manual andautomatic hinting cannot complement each other inside thesame glyph. Any manually hinted glyph is excluded from the
autohinting process. Thus, if you decide to add hints manually,
you must fully hint the glyph.
There are two types of glyph-level hints you can add
manually, stem hints and ghost hints. Stem hints describe avertical or a horizontal stem or stem-like feature of a glyph,
like a serif or a crossbar. Ghost hints mark top and bottom
edges when a horizontal stem hint cannot be applied. In
combination with alignment zones, horizontal ghost andstem hints are important for the vertical alignment at thevertical font metrics, like the x-height or the ascender. At low
resolutions, the rasterizer will try to vertically align the edgesof all hinted horizontal stems that reach into an alignmentzone. The horizontal hints must have their y coordinates incommon with the nodes that are supposed to align. A single
hint will do for all nodes it touches at its height.

9.3.1 Adding Stem Hints
To add a stem hint to a glyph, right-click and choose Add
Horizontal Hint or Add Vertical Hint from the context menu.
A gray bar with a number badge will appear. The numbers

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   78

indicate the origin (first number) and width (second number)of the hint.
If you add a hint while two nodes are selected, the hint
will be linked to these nodes right away. Adding linked hints
this way even works on multiple node pairs at once, as longas each pair is on a separate outline. For best results, always
link your hints to extremum nodes (see 2.3.15, ‘Extremes andInflections’, p. 20).
Positioning of vertical stem
hints (green) and horizontal
stem hints (yellow).

Select a hint by clicking on its gray number badge. Shiftclick to select multiple hints. You can then edit the values
numerically in the gray Info box (View > Show Info, CmdShift-I). When exactly one hint is selected, press Tab to selectthe next hint, or Shift-Tab to go to the previous one.
A horizontal stem hint, its
number badge indicating a
position of 140 and a width of 40.

To edit a hint graphically, drag the blue marks at the edges of
the hint. The blue circle indicates the hint origin, while thetriangle shows the size and orientation of the hint. If you dragone of the markers onto a node, Glyphs Mini will link the hint
to the position of the node. If you later move the node, theGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   79

hint will adapt accordingly. You can delete one or more hints
by selecting them and pressing the Backspace or Delete key.
Hints linked to nodes withthe blue triangle and circle.

In the final OTF, all stem hints must be positive, i.e., have awidth greater than zero. But even if you mistakenly insert anegative hint, Glyphs Mini will correct its direction at export
time, and all stem hints are turned positive.
9.3.2 Adding Ghost Hints
You can use ghost hints when you need to vertically alignthe top or bottom of a glyph but cannot apply a horizontal
stem hint. Take, for instance, a sans-serif uppercase I. The top
needs to align with the cap height zone, the bottom with thebaseline zone. In a serif I, you would apply horizontal hints
to the serifs, but the sans-serif letter lacks the horizontal
features necessary for a horizontal hint. In this case, you needto put a top ghost hint on the top of the I, and a bottom ghost
hint at the bottom of the I. Similar situations occur on the topGlyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   80of a sans-serif uppercase L, and at the bottom of a sans-serif
uppercase P:
Positioning of ghost hints (blue)
alongside regular stem hints.

You can create a ghost hint by right-clicking on a single nodeand choosing Add Horizontal Hint from the context menu.
Turn any existing hint into a ghost hint by right-clicking thecoordinate badge of a hint and choosing Make Ghost Hint fromthe context menu. The badge of a ghost hint only displays the
position and its orientation. A downward arrow indicates abottom ghost hint, an upward arrow a top ghost hint. Attach
it to a point by dragging the blue circle onto a node. You can
set its vertical orientation by selecting the hint and clicking
on the upward or downward icon in the gray Info box (View >Show Info, Cmd-Shift-I).
A top ghost hint at position
100, and a bottom ghost
hint at position 50.

9.4 TESTING THE SCREEN RENDERING
Test the hinting in an Adobe application (see 2.11.2, ‘Previewing
in Adobe Applications’, p. 36). Write a test text and zoomout far enough so that the letters are displayed with a few
pixels only. Then zoom in using the operating system’s Zoom
function, which you can configure in the Accessibility settingsof the System Preferences.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   81

10 Error Handling10.1 GLYPH NAMES
The most common source of problems when exporting fonts
are bad glyph names. Make sure all your glyph names• only contain letters A-Z, a-z, numerals 0-9, underscore (_),
hyphen (-) or period (.),• start with a letter (A-Z, a-z), except for ‘.notdef’, andnon-exporting glyphs, e.g., smart glyphs, that start withan underscore,• contain no whitespace characters (space, tab, return, etc.),
not even at the end,
• and contain no non-ASCII characters (like á, è, ß or ü).
Not adhering to these guidelines may yield an error message
at export time like ‘There is a problem with a glyph named:’,followed by the bad glyph name and a descriptive explanationof the problem within brackets, e.g., ‘The glyph name should
not contain any space character.’ Such error messages can also
occur when trying to compile the OpenType feature code inFile > Font Info. You can find bad names by searching for space(or other invalid characters) in the search field of the Fontview (Cmd-F).

10.2 FONT NAMES
If your error message only entails a POSIX path to a file called‘FontMenuNameDB’, set between brackets (e.g., ‘[/Users/<yourusername>/Library/Application Support/Glyphs-Mini/
Temp/<your fontname>/FontMenuNameDB]’), then there
probably is an invalid character in the font name or stylename. Revise your entries in File > Font Info (Cmd-I). You can
use spaces, but no non-ASCII characters.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   82

10.3 DUPLICATE UNICODE VALUES
In some fonts, two or more letters erroneously carry thesame Unicode. If you try to import such a font with double
encodings, Glyphs Mini will warn you about it. Selecting all
glyphs and choosing Font > Update Glyph Info will usually fix
that problem. In the reverse situation, where one glyph sports
two Unicodes, Glyphs Mini will silently reset the Unicodevalue based on the glyph name. The usual suspects for this are
Delta and Omega. Delta should only be U+0394, but sometimes
also has U+2206, the code for the mathematical increment
operator (glyph name: increment). Omega, which should only
be encoded with U+03A9, sometimes also sports U+2126, thecodepoint for the Ohm symbol (glyph name: Ohm).

Tip: If you do want to keepa glyph accessible via two
different codes, it is betterto create a duplicate glyph.

10.4 MISSING OUTLINES
Sometimes the font does export, but some glyphs are empty
or parts of glyphs are missing.
10.4.1 Open Paths
Outlines which are not closed are ignored and will not show
up in the final font. So, if a glyph appears empty in the OTF, it
is a good idea to check if its paths are actually closed.
10.4.2 Wrong Path Orientation
Outlines must be oriented counter-clockwise, except for
counters, which need to be oriented clockwise. Otherwise,
counters may appear ‘closed’ or missing. You can fix theorientation of selected outlines manually by choosing Reverse
Selected Contours from their context menu, or reverse all
outlines via choosing Reverse All Contours from the context
menu when no outlines are selected. Glyphs Mini will try toapply heuristics to fix outline directions on any number of
selected glyphs with Glyph > Correct Path Direction.
10.4.3 Multiple Paths on Top of Each Other
Two similar paths on top of each other with varying pathorientations may delete each other at export. You canselect exactly one whole path by double clicking it. Press
the Backspace key to delete it. If it looks like nothing haschanged, then you had at least two identical outlines on top ofeach other.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   83

11 Import and Export
11.1 VECTOR DRAWING APPLICATIONS
11.1.1 Adobe Illustrator
First, find the right scale for your drawings in Adobe
Illustrator. One point in Illustrator corresponds to one unit
Tip: To quickly get the rightscale, draw a rectangle within Glyphs Mini, i.e., an element that is 100 pt high will end
the height of the capital letters
up at a height of 100 units in Glyphs Mini. Alternatively, you
in Glyphs, copy and paste it
can start in Illustrator and set the artboard to a height of
into an Illustrator artboard
your UPM size in points, e.g., 1000 pt if your UPM is 1000. Bothand scale the drawings to fit
ascenderand descender should fit inside the artboard. If you
the height of the rectangle.
set the page origin to the intersection of base line and LSB, thepaths will have the right position. In Illustrator up to Version
CS4, set the origin of the page by dragging the cross hair in the
top left corner between the rulers. In Illustrator CS5 or later,
set the origin of the page in the Artboard Options.
11.1.2 Sketch
If you are importing outlines from Sketch, set your contour to
1 pt outline without fill. This will prevent double outlines in
Glyphs Mini.

11.2 FONTLAB STUDIO
11.2.1 From FontLab Studio 5 to Glyphs Mini
There is a FontLab macro available for exporting Glyphs Mini
files directly out of FontLab Studio. Point your web browser togithub.com/schriftgestalt/Glyphs-Scripts/ and download thescript called ‘Glyphs Export.py’. To install, invoke Go > Go to
Folder in Finder, enter ~/Library/Application Support/FontLab/Studio 5/Macros/ and place the file in the Macros folder thatis displayed then. After restarting FontLab, it will become
available in the macro toolbar.
11.2.2 From Glyphs Mini to FontLab Studio 5
Again, there is a Python script to import Glyphs Mini files
into FontLab. You can get it from the same Github repository
mentioned above. This time, look for a script named ‘Glyphs
Import.py’ and place it in your FontLab Macros folder.
Keep in mind that some features are not available in
FontLab, and therefore the result may not be exactly the same.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   84For instance, FontLab Studio cannot nest components, andtherefore, the script will decompose them in the conversion.

11.3 OPENTYPE
11.3.1 Opening Existing Fonts
While you can open existing PFB, OTF, TTC, and TTF fonts,
Glyphs Mini cannot reverse-engineer all the information
inside a compiled font file. That means that opening an OTF
For more details on opening
existing fonts, seeand exporting it again will produce a file that is different fromglyphsapp.com/tutorials/
the original. It is strongly advised to always work on a copy.
importing-existing-fonts

11.3.2 Generating OpenType Fonts
Choosing File > Export (Cmd-E) will bring up the Export dialog.
To generate an OpenType font for use in layout or word
processing applications, pick OpenType as export format.

The Remove Overlap option applies an algorithm to remove
path overlaps at export, similar to the Remove Overlap
function in the Glyph menu. In a release font, overlaps must
be removed. So, uncheck this only for testing purposes, tospeed up the export. You can safely uncheck this option if you
have already removed overlaps in the file.
The Autohint option applies the AFDKO autohinting
algorithm to all glyphs that do not have any manually set
hints. This option expects standard stems and alignment
zones to be set correctly (see 9.3.1, ‘Adding Stem Hints’, p. 78).
Uncheck this option for fonts that should not be hinted, or inorder to speed up export for testing purposes.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   85The Export Destination option allows you to set a default
location into which the fonts will get exported. If you do not
set a destination, Glyphs Mini will bring up a save dialog. Be
aware that exporting your font will overwrite any previous
instances with the same name in the same export location.
This can be useful if you use the Adobe Fonts folder as export
destination (see 2.11.2, ‘Previewing in Adobe Applications’,
p. 36).
11.3.3 Generating Webfonts
To export OpenType fonts for the web, choose File >Export (Cmd-E) and check the Webfont option.

The Export Destination setting works like it does for CFFbased OpenType desktop fonts. See section 11.3.2, ‘Generating
OpenType Fonts’ (p. 85) for details.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   86

12 Preferences
12.1 ACCESSING APPLICATION PREFERENCES
Open the Preferences window through Glyphs Mini >Preferences (Cmd-comma) to access all applicationwide preferences.
12.1.1 Updates
The Updates section controls how Glyphs Mini handles
software updates. Clicking on the Check now button will
initiate a version check and, if available, offer you a newversion for download and installation, presenting you achange log describing the latest additions and changes. The
time stamp of the latest check is displayed next to the button.
If enabled, the Automatically Check for Updates option will
periodically try to establish an internet connection and see if
a new app version is available for download from the Glyphs
servers. We recommend keeping this option on.
Show Cutting Edge Versions will also offer you beta versions,rather than only stable versions. Bug fixes are available muchsooner this way. Enable this option if you cannot wait for the
stable version or want to experiment with new app features.
Although, beta versions are not as thoroughly tested as stableversions. That is why we recommend to always work with filecopies if you are testing cutting edge versions.

You can revert back to the stable version by downloading thetrial from glyphsapp.com/mini.
12.1.2 User Settings
Text View Width controls the line width of text entered in Editview. The value entered is measured in thousandths of an em.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   87This measurement is independent from your Units per Em
value as entered in Font Info.
Handle Size controls the size of all displayed points in Editview, such as on-curve nodes, control handles, anchors, andposition markers of manual hints. Larger nodes make it easier
to click-select a point, while smaller nodes make for a cleaner
user interface.
You can set the display colors of corner nodes, smoothnodes, alignment zones, positive and negative kerning
indicators in the Edit view, and the canvas color. The Standard
button resets the color values to their defaults.

12.1.3 Sample Strings
Here, you can import, edit, reset, copy, or paste default sample
strings, separated by newlines. The text field is Unicode savvy,
so you can enter any diacritic and non-Latin characters. Use abackward slash followed by a lowercase n (\‌n) for a newline in
the sample string. Use a forward slash followed by the glyph
name and a separator character (either a space or anotherforward slash) as an escape for any glyph. This is especially
useful for hard-to-type or unencoded glyphs, e.g., OpenTypevariations such as ‘/a.sc’.
Use ‘/‌Placeholder’ (with a forward slash and a separator
character at the end) for a placeholder function, i.e., thecurrent glyph in Edit view. This can be useful for seeing thecurrent glyph several times between other glyphs, e.g.:/o/Placeholder/o/Placeholder/Placeholder/o/o/Placeholder
for setting the current glyph around and between lowercaseo’s, which may help when spacing.
Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   88The Open File button allows you to import an external text
file, whereas the Standard button will reset the sample texts
to the app defaults. For more details on how to use sample
strings, see section 2.8.1, ‘Sample Texts’ (p. 29).

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   89

13 Appendix
13.1 AUTOMATIC FEATURE GENERATION
Glyphs Mini can automatically generate a number of
OpenType features if it finds glyphs with certain names in
the font.

For a complete list oflanguage tags, see:microsoft.com/typography/
otspec/languagetags.htm

Find out more about
these languages andother localizations:glyphsapp.com/tutorials/
tag/languages

liga

Ligature

Join the glyph names of the components withan underscore (‘_’). Some common ligatures(f_f_i, f_f_l, f_f, fi, fl, lu_lakkhangyao-thai,ru_lakkhangyao-thai) are automaticallyplaced in the liga feature, all others go intodlig by default. However, if you want to force
a ligature into the liga feature, you can add a‘.liga’ suffix to its name, e.g., f_b.liga or ­yi_yi-cy.
liga.

dlig

Discretionary
Ligatures

Join the glyph names of the components withan underscore (‘_’), e.g., f_odieresis.

locl

Localized Forms Add ‘.loclXXX’ to the glyph name, where XXX
represents the three letter language tag, e.g.,‘.loclENG’ for English, or ‘.loclSVE’ for Swedish.
There also is a built-in list of glyphs which
which trigger localizations:•  idotaccent, i.TRK or i.loclTRK: trigger
i substitutions for TRK, AZE, CRT, KAZ
and TAT if i is present.
•  Scommaccent, Tcommaaccent,scommaaccent, and tcommaaccent: trigger
substitutions for ROM and MOL if Scedilla,
Tcedilla, scedilla, and tcedilla are present.
•  periodcentered.loclCAT (add a .case suffix
for uppercase; L_periodcentered_L.loclCAT,
l_periodcentered_l.loclCAT; or the legacy
Ldot, ldot: trigger ella geminada (puntvolat) substitutions for CAT if L, l, andperiodcentered are also present in the font.
•  Iacute_J.loclNLD and iacute_j.loclNLD,
or Jacute and jacute: trigger accented ij
substitutions for NLD if Iacute, iacute, J, andj are present.

ordn Ordinals

Automatically built if default figures, numero,
ordfeminine and ordmasculine are found in
the font.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017  

90

frac Fractions

The frac feature is generated from the .numr,.dnom and fraction glyphs. If they are notpresent in the font, then the feature will
be composed from any pre-built fractions
available in the font, like onehalf, onequarter,
threequarters etc

aalt All Alternatives Glyphs automatically builds the aalt feature
based on all features that substitute glyphs.

Glyphs Mini Handbook, March 2017   91