Advanced diacritics: multiple anchors
Sometimes, marks can have different positions. This is when you need more than one anchor. Warning: fun type nerdery ahead.
Take, for example, these two diacritic gems found in Vietnamese typography: ecircumflexacute
and ecircumflextilde
.
In short, these are two cases of ecircumflex
, one of them with an additional acutecomb
on top, the other one with an extra tildecomb
. Look closely. The tilde is centered above the circumflex, the acute goes sort of next to it. There are various ways to swing this. Here’s a particularly nerdy one.
Okay, I assume you have an e
with a top
anchor in it. Plus circumflexcomb
, tildecomb
and acutecomb
with a corresponding _top
anchor each. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read this blogpost about diacritics before you read on here.
Now, if we create ecircumflexacute
and ecircumflextilde
now, then Glyphs will by default put them together like this:
Ouch, not good. But why is this? Simple. Both tildecomb
and circumflexcomb
carry a _top
anchor (with the underscore at the beginning). So once they go into a composite glyph, they’ll look for a top
anchor to place themselves on. The only one they’ll find is the top
anchor in e
. So, being the logical people that we are, we need extra top
anchors in circumflexcomb
, one in the center (for the tildecomb
) and one shifted to the right a bit (for the acutecomb
).
Alternative anchors get an underscore extension , so we call the second anchor top_alt
or top_right
. If we choose to plant many anchors, we can even enumerate them, e.g. top_1
, top_2
etc. or call them something descriptive like top_viet
or top_acute
. You can also easily copy anchors by pressing alt
while dragging them. I choose to call the top
anchor top_viet
, like this:
Now, back to the composite glyphs. If a diacritical mark has more than one place to go, you can activate the mark component and pick its anchor in the grey info box:
Or, if you’re too lazy, there’s a script for that: on mekkablue’s github. You’ll find a script called _Move acute, grave and hook to topviet, which automatically puts acutecomb, gravecomb, hookabovecomb on 'top_viet' in all selected glyphs.
That’s it! Works like a charm. Now have fun with mark anchors, type nerds!
Update 2015-09-02: updated to new glyph names in Glyphs 2.
Update 2020-03-13: corrected typos.
Update 2022-07-22: updated title, related articles, minor formatting.