SOLVED Anchors



  • 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



  • 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!



  • 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...


  • admin

    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


  • admin

    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