Glyphs 3: Make Things You Love

Blog
by Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer
en zh

16 November 2020 Published on 15 November 2020

Together, we have come a long way. Now is the time to make things you love. Welcome to Glyphs, version 3.

In its third major iteration, Glyphs has become more customizable, more user-friendly, more stable, more efficient, smarter and, above all, more script-neutral than ever before. After three years of intensive development, we are more than happy to make version 3 available to you.

Have you been using Glyphs before? Let us give you a rundown of what is new in Glyphs 3.

New icon, new app start

Say hello to the new app icon:

We hope you like it as much as we do. In the design process, together with Italian-American designers Andrea Trabucco-Campos and Matteo Bologna, it grew on us so much, we were missing it when we did not have it in our dock.

So, let’s double click that app, shall we? When you start Glyphs without documents, you are presented with the new Start Window:

You see, you are presented with options to create a new document, open a recent file, and with helpful links to the website. You can invoke the dialog later with Window > Start Window. If you choose to create a new document, you can start and build your font with the glyph sets you want:

If you choose to deactivate the splash screen at start-up, you can also invoke the document builder directly through File > New from Glyph Sets…

Good, so let’s start drawing.

Drawing and shaping

Switch to your Draw tool (P), start drawing a path, and hold down the Cmd key while you are dragging handles. You will lock the length of the counter handle, enabling you to draw asymmetric smooth handles:

Needless to say, you can combine it with the space key to reposition the triplet of points while still holding down the mouse button.

Speaking of curves, we have revamped the Fit Curve palette. The plus and minus buttons allow you to increase and decrease existing curvatures. The small vertical indicators below the buttons show current handle lengths of all selected curve segments. That way you have some orientation before you choose a new curvature.

View > Show Nodes > Extra Nodes shows predicted intersection points. That means, you can add corner components on them without removing overlaps first. Great for non-destructively adding ink traps, for instance:

Pretty cool.

And the next thing is pretty cool too… you can now add, ta-daaa: segment components! Create a glyph with a name that starts with _segment, add a dot suffix to its name, draw an open path and add anchors (Cmd-U). Then select a segment in a host path and choose Add Segment Component from the context menu:

This way you can inject the same open path into path segments of the host paths. This allows you to keep tapered stems in sync, or draw more complex bits, e.g., for Tuscan designs.

Decompose selected segments via the context menu. And the best of it all: it interpolates, and exports to variable fonts too! Read the tutorial about segment components.

You can now apply closed outlines in a _brush glyph as brushes on segments. They will be stretched and bent onto the receiving path segment. So you can do cool stuff like this:

It does not matter whether the receiving path is closed or open, and whether the segment is a curve or line segment. Again, you can decompose via the context menu. Read the tutorial about brushes.

Also, classic components now indicate their alignment with a subtle color tint. Automatically aligned components are displayed green, unaligned components are shown in a simple grey. In this example, the dotaccentcomb is unaligned, while the base letter idotless is automatically aligned:

In Glyphs 3, you can non-destructively apply a live stroke width and other to a path. Select any open or closed path, and in the bottom right corner of the window, you will find a Stroke panel:

In the past, this has been possible already with filters like Offset Path and their respective custom parameters. But now, it is live and visible within Edit view, and you get to apply all kinds of graphic attributes:

  • Stroke width: width of the expanded stroke in units.
  • Stroke placement: inside, outside or expanding equally in and out. The latter will spread half the expansion on the outside, and half inside. However, if it is an uneven number, the outside expansion will receive the extra unit. Example: 11 units will result in an expansion of 5 units on the inside, and 6 on the outside. If you want a more precise distribution, consider a higher Subdivision in Font Info > Other.
  • Fill: fill color or gradient of a closed outline. Only available on a Color Layer.
  • Mask: if a closed path is defined as masking, then it will be subtracted from any pre-ordered shapes. Control shape order through Filter > Shape Order. Useful for stencil designs, and for illustrations.
  • Stroke endings (available both live and in the Offset Path filter): select a path ending (the first or last node in an open path), and then choose any of the available line butt styles displayed on the little buttons in the bottom right corner.

Once you have set up a graphic style of a path, you can Copy and Paste Attributes from one path to another via the context menu. Also through the context menu, you can Expand Outlines in order to get the closed final outlines as they would appear in the exported compiled font.

Editing

You can focus on paths now. While editing a complex glyph, you may want to exclusively edit one path, and keep the other paths as they are. Select the path, or a part of it, then choose Focus on Selected Paths from the context menu:

Or lock a glyph when you are finished editing it, and you want to prevent accidental edits later. Again, open the glyph in Edit view, and toggle the Locked status in the context menu:

A small lock indicator in the top right, both in Edit View and the Font View cell will show you the lock status of the respective glyph:

If locking the whole glyph is too much, just lock a path. As you would expect, all you need to do is click on a node of a path, then choose Lock Path from the context menu:

Next time you try to drag a node with your mouse, it will not let you. Instead, the node just gets a red highlight:

Unlock the path again through the context menu. The corresponding menu entry is, you guessed it, Unlock Path.

What used to be the function for ‘making’ a corner is now called Sharpen Corner and available in the context menu. Segments adjacent to the current point selection are continued until they intersect. Great way to get rid of a serif, for instance.

Some menus are restructured. Transformations and Remove Overlap have moved into the Paths menu. The secondary functionalities of Transformations are now split into separate, more accessible menu items, and we put them where they belong. First of all, Glyph > Transform Metrics:

… the actual Paths > Transformations, …

… and Paths > Interpolate with Background:

All of that, by the way, helps reduce clutter in the Filter menu, so you can clutter it up again with the Plugin Manager, ha. More about that in a minute. A few other menu items got renamed into something more authentic:

  • Glyph > Create Composite (Cmd-Ctrl-C), formerly known as Make Component Glyph
  • Paths > Other > Sharpen Corner (also in context menu), formerly known as Make Corner
  • Filter > Shape Order, formerly known as Fix Compatibility

Edit > Paste Special (with the Opt key held down, Cmd-Opt-V) now allows you to paste glyphs as components into the selected target glyphs:

Alternatively, you can also add the same component into many glyphs at once with Glyphs > Add Component (Cmd-Shift-C):

Selecting

Before you can edit, you need to select. Glyphs 3 offers you two new ways of selecting paths: first, you can now use the Lasso Select tool (Shift-V):

… and simply drag your mouse around the parts you want to select:

Oh, and we have something really cool. Remember how difficult it is to select the right things in a bold condensed italic design? Now simply slant your selection rectangle: hold the Ctrl key while you are dragging your mouse in order to change the slant angle:

Working with multiple compatible masters? Then it is probably a good idea to keep your selection in sync across all masters. To achieve that, just make sure Edit > Keep Layer Selections in Sync is active. And Glyphs will keep the same points, anchors and components selected as you step through your master layers.

Multiple Masters

… speaking of which: we have updated and overhauled much of the way multiple master editing works in Glyphs. For one thing, if you have many masters, and they cannot be displayed as buttons in the toolbar anymore, you can access all masters in the fold-out menu in the top right corner of the window:

We have a new algorithm for correcting path direction in place, which produces more consistent results in shape reordering and determining start points. Therefore it is more likely a glyph is compatible after running the command on every master. And even if that should fail, you can now move start points directly in Compatibility View. Turn on View > Show Compatibility (Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-N), and drag a start point in any of the other masters:

The Layers palette has been upgraded significantly. It is now packed with extra functionality. For one thing, you can now easily reorder backup layers:

Drop a layer on the master layer and they will swap places, same as selecting Use as Master Layer from the gear menu. Plus, there is a little filter button next to the gear button, which allows you to either Hide Backup Layers or Only Show Layer from Current Master in the Layers palette. Helps reduce clutter in the palette. And even better, now you can set the Layer Type via the context and the gear menus. No more figuring out the layers’ naming syntax for brace and bracket layers. Instead, once you have added the special layer, simply double click its name in the Layers palette to access its settings:

Intermediate Layer: formerly known as Brace Layer, an intermediate master at a specified axis coordinate for the glyph in question. Use Reinterpolate for deriving the layer content from the current master layers.

Alternate Layer: formerly known as Bracket Layer, an alternate master for the glyph in question, kicking in at a specified axis coordinate. Psst. You can even combine both layer types in one and the same layer. That way you can have an intermediate layer on an alternate interpolation. Wow.

If you hold down the Option key while you choose from the drop-down menu, all editing commands are now available for all masters. In order to fit it all onto the keyboard, we had to change a small number of keyboard shortcuts:

  • Glyph > Update Metrics (Ctrl-Cmd-M)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Glyph > Add Component (Cmd-Shift-C)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Glyph > Create Composite (Ctrl-Cmd-C)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Glyph > Decompose Components (Cmd-Shift-D)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Glyph > Set Anchors (Cmd-U)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Glyph > Reset Anchors (Cmd-Shift-U)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Paths > Correct Path Direction (Cmd-Shift-R)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Paths > Round Coordinates
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Paths > Tidy Up Paths (Cmd-Shift-T)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • Paths > Remove Overlap (Cmd-Shift-O)
    + Opt: for All Masters
  • context menu on an individual node: Make Node First
    + Opt: in All Masters
  • context menu on one or more nodes: Open Corner
    + Opt: in All Masters
  • context menu on one or more node pairs: Reconnect Nodes
    + Opt: in All Masters

Working with many masters has just become a lot easier. Keep in mind that we had to change some of these keyboard shortcuts, though only those that used to have the Opt key in previous versions of Glyphs. And Opt is now reserved for all-master action. Most prominently, Tidy up Paths, Reset Anchors or Create Composite have new shortcuts. We have gotten used to them pretty quickly though, and we believe you will too.

Previewing

You asked for it, you got it: you can now preview long texts set in your instances, rendered with Apple’s CoreText. Access the text preview via Window > Text Preview:

And now, you can freely drag around your preview in Edit View, comes in handy if you have many styles or a bit too much text in Edit View. Simply click and drag it with your mouse, it’s that easy:

Color and images

In the Layers palette, you can choose between available color layer types:

  • Color: will export as SVG table in a font, or as a color image (SVG, PDF or PNG) via Filter > Glyph as Image. You can also set the master layer to this type. On a Color layer, you can apply colors to strokes, fill closed outlines with a solid color or gradients, and add shadows and glows to objects.
  • Color Palette: will export as CPAL/COLR tables in a font, needs to correspond to the palette set up in File > Font Info > Font.
  • iColor: will export as sbix table in a font, or as pixel SVG with the SBIX to SVG custom parameter.

The image export for SVG, PDF and PNG is currently tucked away in Filter > Glyphs as Image. That way, each glyph can have its own image export settings:

It can do powerful things, like multiple file type exports, individual scalings and paddings, and custom naming for each exported file. You can control the dimensions of the image if you bring up the Glyph Info (Cmd-Opt-I) and set the glyph category to Icon. Then you can edit dimensions in the grey glyph info panel (View > Show Info, Cmd-Shift-I):

With View > Show Pixel Preview you can see what the rasterized PNG is going to look like. Control the pixel size via the context menu. The exported image will be everything that fits inside the lines. You can preview by holding down the space bar, and see if there are any unwanted clippings.

Although it still has a bit of an experimental character, we have been using this function all along: all icons and other imagery inside Glyphs have been created in Glyphs, and exported this way.

Managing glyphs

A lot has happened in the sidebar in Font View (Cmd-Opt-1). First of all, the Glyph Search (Cmd-F) has moved to its top:

And you can not only filter your glyphs with a GREP search, you can also combine a search with any other Category, Language or Filter that is available in the sidebar, and further narrow down your selection of glyphs. Plus, besides glyph names and Unicode values, you can now also search in glyph notes.

The Categories now not only filter, they also indicate the number of glyphs you already have in them:

And look closely, we introduced the first Smart Category for Small Caps: it lets you know which small caps are still missing based on the current set of upper- and lowercase glyphs in your font. So if you add more glyphs, the number badge next to the Small Caps entry will increase by one, reminding you that there is another small cap glyph waiting to be added.

One of the coolest novelties is that in Glyphs 3, you can customize your own list of Languages in the sidebar. It comes with a bunch of large world scripts pre-filled, but click on the plus button next to it, and in the UI that pops up, remove the scripts you never work with, and add the scripts you specialize in:

And best of it all, if you open a font that contains glyphs for a world script that is not in your sidebar, then it will be temporarily added. That way, you do not have to juggle that gear menu all the time. All the font engineers will love this.

Glyph info

You can access a glyph’s info through Edit > Info for Selection (Cmd-Opt-I) anywhere now, including from within Edit View:

So, no more switching to Font View for editing glyph info. Do take a look at the new options we have available in the glyph info dialog. For one thing, we can now set the Writing Direction directly, which mainly has an influence on the way kerning is handled for the glyph.

All the way at the bottom, you will find the Sort Name, which not only controls the way the glyphs are sorted in Font View, but also the order in which they are eventually written into the compiled OpenType file. And that will be the order in which most glyph palettes will display the glyphs. Let’s say, for example, you never really liked the way that there were other O diacritics between Ø and Œ:

So you want to move the Ø right in front of the Œ. First, bring up the glyph info (Edit > Info for Selection or Cmd-Opt-I) for Œ. There, you will see that Œ has a sort order of Oz which makes it sort last amongst the O’s. Being the smart people that we are, we open the Glyph Info dialog for Ø, and set its Sort Order to Oy, and it now sorts the way we want it to:

Note the little info symbol in the top right of its cell. Hovering your mouse over it will display a tooltip explaining that this glyph has ‘manually set glyph info’. Good way to spot your glyph info interventions right away.

Case is not an afterthought of the Subcategory anymore, it is now its separate class. And it can have any of these values:

  • Uppercase: all caps of scripts that casefold, like Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian, Adlam, Armenian, Glagolitic, Old Hungarian, Latin, and some more.
  • Lowercase: all corresponding small letters of such scripts.
  • Small Caps: all typographic small and petite capitals that are supposed to trigger c2sc, c2pc, pcap and smcp OpenType features.
  • Minor: all glyphs, mostly figures, that are drawn smaller than usual and are differentiated by their vertical displacement, e.g. nominators, denominators, superior and inferior figures, punctuation and letters, but also modifier letters and the like. The idea is that they can be vertically displaced along the respective italic angle while still retaining automatic alignment.
  • N/A: all glyphs to which none of the above applies.

Modular Font Info

One of our favorite parts in Glyphs 3 is the new Font Info window. For one thing, a newly opened File > Font Info window appears pretty empty at first:

That is because we have made the UI completely modular, and you add just the items that you need. Best of all, there is inline documentation, which makes adding custom parameters way more fun now. When you click on the plus button to add a new parameter, you can browse and search through parameters, and read the documentation for the selected parameter, right where it matters:

No more back and forth between appendices in the documentation and the Font Info UI. Many things are organized much better and are now where they belong. For instance, all naming-related properties are situated under General. All other items go into Custom Parameters, except for Axes, which is a separate section in the Font tab now. Take your time and poke around a bit, you will find your way around pretty quickly.

Wherever possible, the UI will offer you to easily localize Font Info entries for as many languages as you like: just duplicate an entry with the plus button next to it, pick a language from the pop-up menu, and type away:

And once you have your entries set up, you can transfer them to another font simply by selecting all, copying and pasting in the other font’s Font Info window. Also, you can batch-edit multiple masters and instances at once. Shift- or Cmd-select your masters and instances, and simply edit the entries. It’s that easy.

In Font Info > Masters, the Metrics are completely redone: vertical metrics and zones are not separated anymore, so no more need to enter the same heights twice. You can add conditional filtering to metrics, so a Cyrillic ascender and a Devanagari ra-rekha height do not appear in the same glyph together. Universal metrics will be used as PostScript alignment zones.

In Font Info > Font > Exports (formerly known as Instances), you can now add Variable Font Settings and use custom parameters that apply to the complete OTVar, e.g., to change the family name, or to apply a subset.

OpenType Features

Glyphs now has its own feature code compiler. If you know what it means, we are happy to tell you that we have dropped Adobe’s MakeOTF, and completely replaced it with our own mechanism for building the GSUB, GPOS, and GDEF binaries. And that makes a lot of new cool features possible.

Your feature coding heart will beat higher when you see the new File > Font Info > Features: it sports improved syntax coloring, Cmd-plus and Cmd-minus shortcuts for changing font size, and autocompletion of glyph and class names:

No more typos in long glyph names! You can toggle autocompletion with the Esc key. Furthermore, you will love the fully customizable code snippet menu, the Opt-click preview of glyphs and classes:

Yes, it even shows you the glyph colors. But wait, there’s more. While you type your code, Glyphs peeks over your shoulder and checks your code syntax. If it finds something fishy, it will highlight typos and mistakes, and wherever possible, it will even suggest corrections:

Amazing. But Glyphs does not only check warnings in the feature currently displayed. It marks features in the sidebar if it detects an error, so you can see immediately which of the features needs attention. In this example, the blwf feature has a problem:

Take a closer look at the screenshot, and you will find a few cool things: you can set stylistic set names directly in the UI, fully localizable, of course. Just above the ssXX naming, there is a Spec button, which takes you directly to the specification of that feature on the Microsoft page. Note the snippets menu in the bottom right. And if you add a new feature, by clicking on the plus button, you get the full list of registered features to browse and search through:

One more thing about features. You can now add dynamic code with tokens. Tokens are pieces of code that follow a $ dollar sign. Principally, you would use tokens for two purposes.

First, a number value which you can define in File > Font Info > Masters > Number Values. In short, number values are variables that interpolate. Example: in the Masters, you define a number value called pad as 50 in the Light, and 5 in the Bold master. In your feature code, you can add a kern (Kerning) feature with something like this:

pos @L @A $pad;

And in the resulting GPOS feature code, the respective interpolated value of pad would get inserted in the token’s place. But it gets even better. Let’s add a cpsp (Capital Spacing) feature with a positioning rule like this:

pos @brackets <$pad 0 ${pad*2} 0>

Yes, you read that right. Inside a ${...} structure, you can even add calculations! This can be a godsend for manual GPOS code. Read more about it in the new tutorial: Positioning with Number Values.

Wait, so numbers are the first thing you would use tokens for. What is the second thing? Put your seatbelts on for predicate tokens. Predicate tokens have a $[...] structure, and what you can put between these square brackets is pure NSPredicate code. And you can do extremely cool stuff for dynamically collecting glyph names for feature classes. One example:

sub [ $[case==smallCaps] ] slash' by slash.sc;

The structure $[case==smallCaps] expands to a.sc b.sc c.sc d.sc and so on, so it expands to:

sub [ a.sc b.sc c.sc d.sc ] slash' by slash.sc;

And the best thing, it does that dynamically, so you do not need to collect all small caps glyphs yourself, or worry about subsetting, because that feature code is updated all automatically. And you can insert that token anywhere in your Prefix, Classes or Features code. To give you a little inspiration, here are some code samples for predicate tokens:

$[name endswith '.sc'] # will expand to all glyph names that end in ".sc"
$[layer0.width < 500] # layer0 = first master
$[layers.count > 1] # compare numbers with: == != <= >= < >
$[direction == 2] # 0=LTR, 1=BiDi, 2=RTL
$[colorIndex == 5]
$[case == smallCaps] # predefined constants: noCase, upper, lower, smallCaps, minor, other
$[name matches "S|s.*"] # "matches": regular expression
$[leftMetricsKey like "*"] # "like": wildcard search
$[name like "*e*"] # e anywhere in the name
$[script like "latin"]
$[category like "Separator"]
$[leftKerningGroup like "H"]
$[rightKerningGroup like "L"]
$[unicode beginswith "03"] # beginswith, endswith, contains
$[note contains "love it"] # glyph note
$[countOfUnicodes > 1]
$[countOfLayers > 1]
$[subCategory like "Arrow"]
$[hasHints == 0] # boolean: false, no, 0 versus true, yes, 1
$[isColorGlyph == true]
$[hasComponents == true and script == "latin"] # connect multiple conditions with OR, AND, XOR
$[hasTrueTypeHints == false]
$[hasAlignedWidth == true]
$[hasPostScriptHints == true]
$[hasAnnotations == true]
$[hasCorners == true] # corners = corner components
$[hasSpecialLayers == yes] # special layers = color, brace and bracket layers
$[isHangulKeyGlyph == no]

To verify a token, try Opt-clicking on it… boom, haha. So cool. OT feature coding is fun again, finally. But wait, there’s more.

You probably know how Glyphs has been reliably and automatically creating mark and mkmk features based on your mark attachment anchors. Now there is a new twist to it: contextual mark attachment can be set up with special, asterisk-prefixed anchors again. Let’s take the bottomanchor in an Arabic sad-ar.init as an example. Let’s say, we want to move any bottom marks a bit to the left in case a preceding reh-ar reaches in from the right. What you do now is duplicate the bottom anchor and rename it to * bottom, i.e., you prefix it with an asterisk *, with or without a space in between. This is your contextual bottom anchor. Whenever a contextual anchor is selected, the palette sidebar on the right (Cmd-Opt-P) will display a section called Anchor Context at the bottom. And there, you can type your glyph context as you would in OT feature code, just with * as placeholder for the glyph, reh-ar * in our example. Since it is OT feature code, you can also type in class names, and even tokens:

If you need more than one contextual anchor, add an arbitrary dot suffix, e.g., *bottom.noon and *bottom.reh, and so forth.

Oh, and I saved the best thing for last. You can now add feature code preprocessor macros. That means that you can add feature code for just variable fonts:

#ifdef VARIABLE
condition 600 < wght < 900;
sub dollar by dollar.bold;
#endif

See? You can add OTVar feature variations directly in your feature code with a condition. Always add both boundaries around the axis tag. If you have conditions on multiple axes, concatenate them with commas:

#ifdef VARIABLE
condition 600 < wght < 900, 70 < wdth < 90;
sub won by won.boldcondensed;
#endif

If you want a feature code part to just apply to a static font instead, use the #ifndefkeyword (note the extra n between if and def):

#ifndef VARIABLE
sub x by x.static; # ignored in variable fonts
#endif

Extending

Window > Plugin Manager now lets you search and filter installed and uninstalled extensions. We are happy to announce that pretty much all available plug-ins have been updated and are ready for use in Glyphs 3. Enjoy!

Plugin Manager now also manages Python scripts. All important script collections that we know of are listed and available for free. This makes scripts way more accessible for many users. By the way, if you think one is missing, please let us know in the forum, and we can add it.

The same Plugin Manager now includes modules like Vanilla, which are required by many scripts. And there, you can now even install Python 3 directly form within the Plugin Manager window—with a single click:

Read more about the all-new Plugin Manager in the tutorial Extending Glyphs.

And yes, Glyphs 3 requires Python 3. If you have Python code you are working with, it is easy to update your scripts to Python 3, and at the same time keep them backwards compatible with older versions. But it does not stop there. Does your company have its own script collections you need to manage? In Glyphs > Preferences > Addons, you can add custom package list URLs. All plug-ins, modules and scripts that you need to make available company-wide, it’s a snap to add them now:

All you need to do is add a link to a .plist file like the one we have in our official Plugin Manager repository, and your custom extensions are available for single-click installation inside Window > Plugin Manager. Ah, the joy!

Exporting

We are happy to announce that we have completely reformed the export dialog. File > Export (Cmd-E) will give you, among other things, the static font export dialog:

You can see, we do not separate desktop fonts from webfonts anymore. That makes Remove Overlap optional in WOFF and WOFF2 exports, and Outline Flavour an option, no matter which file extensions you settle for.

And before you ask: Yes, we have canceled EOT. No one needs it anymore. If you are catering to any software or hardware built in the past 10 years, it supports WOFF. In fact, all modern browsers support WOFF2, and in fact no current browser supports EOT anymore. If you really need to support Internet Explorer 6, that is most likely a misunderstanding on your client’s side. It is time to bury EOT altogether, and move on. If the client insists, however, you can still squeeze one out via the Webfont Formats custom parameter in File > Font Info > Instances.

Batch exporting anyone? Hold down the Option key and choose File > Export All (Cmd-Opt-E) to (re)export all open fonts with the most recent export settings:

No further dialogs, no questions asked, just exported and done. Quickest way to update the exports of your family, e.g., your upright and your italic, and switch to the test app.

Preferences

The Glyphs > Preferences window has been completely reworked, and we believe it makes more sense now. First of all, there is the all-new Appearance category:

It allows you to customize all colors, be it for Light or Dark Mode. And by the way, the Handle Size setting also has influence on the size of the text in the Glyphs UI: choose large handles and get large text as well. It makes more sense this way, we think. Just like the new Sample Strings subdivided in sections:

You have an idea for default sample strings that are missing currently? Let us know, so we can add them in the upcoming dot update!

Oh, and probably the best thing in Preferences: define your own keyboard shortcuts.

And not just for the menu commands (which was possible via the System Preferences before), but also for tools, transform actions and context menu items. Sweet.

Availability, pricing and grace period

The full price is USD 299.90 (excluding taxes), and in Europe EUR 299.90 (including taxes). Glyphs 3 is a paid upgrade for existing users. If you have purchased a Glyphs 2 license, you get to upgrade at half price. Discounts are available for students, teachers, and for volume purchases. All details are on the Get Glyphs page.

Have you purchased Glyphs 2 on 1st of June 2020 or later? Then you get to upgrade for free! By the time you are reading this, you should have received your free upgrade coupon in the inbox of the e-mail address you used when you purchased your Glyphs 2 license. Have not received it yet? Double check your spam folder please, or put glyphsapp.com on your e-mail allow list. (The grace period applies to the purchase of Glyphs 2 licenses only, not to Glyphs Mini 2 or Glyphs 1 licenses, sorry.)

New website

We probably could not hide from you that the whole website got quite a brush-over. Typographically, we are using exactly one variable font for everything, namely ABC Dinamo’s Arizona typeface, an original design by Elias Hanzer. And the solid web development was done under immense time pressure by Chris Corby.

We believe the new website is truly user-centered. For instance, the new Learn section allows to sort, filter, bookmark and share tutorials much more easily. In the coming weeks and months, we will be updating all tutorials to accommodate Glyphs 3, so keep an eye on the Learn section. We also are adding more translations, such as Castilian Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. At the same time, we will continue to update the French and Chinese translations. Adding these languages has proven instrumental in circumventing language barriers. Also because of this, we think that, at the moment, Glyphs 3 is the most accessible font editing software in this solar system.

And because the new website is focused around our wonderful international community of font makers, we will be happy to take your input for the website as well. We are continuously collecting quotes from you, our users, and placing them all across the website, your logos for the foundry grid on the home page, your entries for the Resources page, your workshops for the Events page. If you have something to share with the community, just let us know.

Thank you

If there is a place to say thank you, then it is here. A big thank you to everyone who contributed to making Glyphs 3 the app that it is now. Stay safe and healthy.