Glyphs App + Fontself workflow

#1

Hello everyone.

I love drawing in Illustrator, but Glyphs really shines at that. And I’d love to use the smart kerning from Fontself. So, is there any way to work on Glyphs while using the smart kerning from Fontself?

I’ve thought of the next workflow:

  1. Draw the font in Glyphs, no spacing or kerning.
  2. Export
  3. Write all characters in Illustrator and expand shapes
  4. Import on Fontself and smart space and kern the font
  5. Import the metrics in the Glyphs file.
  6. Finish it with the stylistic sets and other advanced Fontself can’t do, yet.

What do you think? It seems complicated but it would take 10-15 minutes.

#2

I think that’s the only way you could do it. Fontself will kern the alternatives too and put them in groups.

One thing that I found is if you have alternatives (stylistic alternatives) fontself names them A.alt1, A.alt2 etc. But glyphs needs the name to be A.ss01, A.ss02 otherwise it won’t auto-create the OpenType code for the alternatives—so you would need to either write the code yourself or rename the metrics that you imported—this is quite easy in Glyphs via the kerning panel, it will also rename all instances.

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#3

To speed up point 3 I have written a Javascript. It converts a text into paths and keeps the names of the letters.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/123822365/Javascript-for-Illustrator-Font-Outline-with-Names

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#4

It sounds interesting, I’ll take a look. Thanks!