Anchors

[andreas]

This might be a stupid question but I just don’t get the way anchors work in RoboFont. I’m new to font editing, I’ve never used FontLab but I’ve seen tutorials about how anchors work there. I understand the purpose of anchors and I understand how FontLab is dealing with it but in RoboFont things seem to work differently and I can’t figure out how.

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

[gferreira]

hi @jhera,

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!

[jhera]

It's 2019 and i still don't get how anchors work in RoboFont (v. 1.8.4). Anchors i create, base glyphs and diacritics, seemingly don't link to each other, so i just add new glyphs using the aring=a+ring kind of syntax than move the diacritic manually to place it right. Can't find the answer on how to link them anywhere, don't really know what terms i should be looking for. The documentation provided by Robofont website is not very helpful for total beginners like me...

[frederik]

there is no native support to build accents 'magically'

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

[frederik]

RoboFont has not yet support natively for placing components with anchor support.

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

font = CurrentFont()

font.generateGlyph("adieresis")

good luck