I’d like to use them to position diacritics. So I placed one anchor in the base glyph a and named it top and another in the accent glyph ¨ named _top. Then I built the ä by adding a and ¨ as components to the empty ä glyph. This is kind of the FontLab way and it doesn’t work.

After trying other combinations without success and failing in research on the web on this specific topic here I am.

Is there an out-of-the-box-behaviour for anchors or are they supposed to be accessed by scripts in order to use them?

Thanks for your help

Andreas

You can use font.generateGlyph(...) to compile glyph with anchor placement.

font = CurrentFont()

font.generateGlyph("adieresis")

good luck

you can still use robofab as the example above

or write a small glyph construction string when adding a glyph

adieresis=a+dieresis@top

see Adding and removing glyphs

there are multiple ways to build accented glyphs in RoboFont. these are described here: Building accented glyphs

have you tried using the Glyph Construction extension?

in 2019 you don’t really need anchors to position diacritics anymore :) you can still use them (with or without underscore), but you can also use guidelines, variables, vertical metrics attributes, reference positions, etc. have a look at the docs & give it a try!