Advanced Diacritics: Narrow Marks
Extending on what we discussed here the other day about diacritics, I’d like to point you to Glyphs’ built-in support for narrow marks.
‘What are narrow marks?’, I hear you ask. Usually, you will build your diacritical marks in such a way that you can re-use them for as many base letters as possible. That’s great for a, e, o, u, y etc. But there are letters that are a little narrower than others, namely i and j. And for those, diacritical marks like macroncomb
, circumflexcomb
and dieresiscomb
may be too wide. Wide marks could collide with the previous letter. Take, for instance, this icircumflex
in the Afrikaans word for ‘wedges’, ‘wîe’. At the beginning of a sentence, you’d capitalize the W and it would look like this:
Okay, it doesn’t exactly collide in this case. So, admittedly, it’s not that dramatic, but it does come too close. We can alleviate that problem with a narrower circumflex that we use on the i (or actually the idotless
, to be precise). So we switch to Font View, go into the Marks category and open the Spacing subcategory. There, we select the circumflexcomb
and choose Duplicate (Cmd-D) from the Font menu. Glyphs adds a copy of the mark to the font and calls it circumflexcomb.001
. We change the extension to .i
or .narrow
and make it a little narrower:

Now, we rebuild icircumflex
by selecting it and choosing Make Component Glyph (Cmd-Opt-Shift-C) from the Layers menu. For diacritics based on i and j, Glyphs will prefer a mark with an .i
or .narrow
ending. And voilà, the whole thing is a little less problematic:
Similarly, you may want to turn your acutecomb.narrow
and your gravecomb.narrow
a little steeper, move the dots in dieresiscomb.narrow
a little closer together, shorten the macroncomb.narrow
, and make the brevecomb.narrow
, tildecomb.narrow
and perhaps even the ogonekcomb.narrow
a little more condensed.
Note: In app versions prior to 2.0,
idotless
andjdotless
were calleddotlessi
anddotlessj
, respectively.
SAMPLE FONT: PLAYFAIR DISPLAY, COURTESY OF CLAUS EGGERS SØRENSEN.
Update 2014-12-11: Updated to new notation for dotless glyphs.
Update 2015-09-02: Updated to new glyph names in Glyphs 2.