Glyphs 4: Create. Love the process.

So here we are. The fourth major iteration of Glyphs has landed. Hope you enjoyed the public preview in the past weeks. As of today, you can upgrade to, or buy Glyphs 4. Join me for a moment, and together, let’s have a look at what’s new.

You can now rotate with the bounding box (View → Show Bounding Box, ⌘⌥⇧B): move your mouse pointer slightly beyond the box handles, and it changes from scaling to rotating. By default, you will rotate your selection around the opposing box corner. Holding down Opt makes it rotate around the box center instead. And the Shift key will give you 45° steps now. Needless to say, you can combine Shift and Opt:

Speaking of rotation, there is also a new Rotate 90 Degrees button in the Transformations panel. Click it, and your selection turns 90° counter-clockwise, hold down the Opt key to rotate clockwise. This button exists, because you showed us how you work with Glyphs, and we saw that many of you kept going back and forth in the panel, between 90° and a small angle. All. The. Time. And we thought, well, we can make this better, can’t we.

The Fit Curve panel now has a button for balancing handles a.k.a. tunnification. Select any curve segments and it will make both BCPs the same relative length (where 100% corresponds to their intersection and 0% complete retraction). The best thing about it: the apparent shape of the curve stays the same, like magic!

One of the coolest new things is the star node. Shift-double click any node between two curve segments, and it will dynamically and non-destructively keep the on-curve on its G2 position, if you know what that means. This way it is ensured that the transition between the two curves is smooth as silk. For converting the node back, just double click it again. For a selection of multiple nodes you can also press Shift-Enter and Enter, respectively. It is non-destructive, and you will see the original curve as a grey outline.

It does not stop there, though. Star nodes also work on curve-to-line transitions. If you turn a node between a line and a curve, you can create the perfect transition there as well! This allows you to build the infamous squircle (mix of square and circle), which you already know as the backdrop of every modern Mac, iPad and iPhone app icon. Careful: the squircle transition needs a bit of extra space and it technically expands the curve into the line segment, so pay extra attention if the straight line is very short.

You will find that open paths are a lot more fun now. Select any open path, and apply a stroke with the controls at the bottom of the right sidebar. Additional, more detailed controls for stroke endings and miters. Even corners in your path can be dynamically rounded now.

But that is not even the best thing. Right-click anywhere on your stroked path, and choose Add Pen Point from the context menu. Now you get an editable pen point. Select it and change the settings shown in the info box below: sizes, angle, ease-in and ease-out.

The stroke will ease in to the values of the pen point from whatever stroke attributes you applied in the right sidebar. You can freely position the pen point within the path segment it is sitting on. Remove the pen point again by selecting it and pressing the delete key.

A lot is new in Font view. First, we have a new viewing mode besides the familiar grid and list: detail mode. The viewing-mode controls have moved to the bottom right of the window, and picking detail mode in the middle will show you basic glyph info like Unicode value, category, etc., right next to the glyph image. It will fill up the place you give it with the info that it has. In other words, detail mode shows more the more you zoom in. Speaking of zooming in Font view, you can zoom much further now. Push the slider all the way to the right and your glyphs become giants.

Next, have you noticed the fully customizable glyph info panel in the bottom left? You do not use colors, but prefer tags instead? No problem, click on the three-dot button and pick exactly what you want to see:

Once you are in Edit view, you can open the left sidebar with the respective button at the top left in the window. By default, it gives you three tabs, the first being a mini font overview. It allows you to search, filter and navigate your font without switching back to Font view or even the Text tool.

The second tab gives you access to the shapes: double click to select, drag to reorder (first to last from bottom to top), and right click to access options for path attributes, and even grouping shapes together.

The third tab is an absolute cracker: interpolate directly in Edit view. Just try it, pull up your most recent multiple-master project and drag the axis sliders, you get a preview of the interpolation and TT conversion, even.

While interpolating, you can click and select the shapes, but the edits won’t stick since you are not in a master layer. Switch back to editing by picking a master again, either by one of the traditional manners, or by clicking one of the arrows that appear next to the sliders, or by right clicking in the canvas and choosing to reset the view from the context menu.

I do not remember how often we were asked for sliders in the past. Well, now you have them. Enjoy.

Oh, and while we are in the left sidebar…

The left sidebar is also where the smart glyph settings live now. Open any _smart glyph for editing, switch the left sidebar to its sliders tab, click on the plus button in the lower left corner, and you have a new glyph axis (formerly known as ‘smart property’ or simply ‘property’).

Add at least one intermediate layer in the Layers panel of the right sidebar, so the smart glyph axis has something to chew on. By the way, if you select all master layers, and then choose Intermediate from the plus button, you get intermediate layer copies for all the masters, and you get to batch-edit their glyph axis value right away. Cool.

You can now already preview your smart glyph interpolations with the sliders of the left sidebar:

The rest stays the same. Insert as component in other glyph, select it, and pull the sliders. Been there, done that.

Slanter is a new filter that helps you create oblique versions of your glyphs, including corrections. This is how it works: First, make sure one vertical and one horizontal stem are set in Font Info → Masters → Stems. Then run Filter → Slanter and play with the options. Most of the time, a combination of Geometric Slant and the Cursivy will get you very far.

Then experiment with the correction options. Merely geometrically forward-slanting an O will mess up its curves. It will make its top right and bottom left parts too thick, whereas the top left and bottom right parts thin out, and the extremes fall into unfavorable places. The Correct Contrast and Correct Shapes options attempt to correct the curve issues. Usually you will need a little contrast correction, and much more shape correction, but your mileage will vary greatly depending on your designs.

Correct Weight corrects straight line segments too, for combatting the dreaded windshield-wiper effect of mere skews.

Slant and Rotate is for the people who want to roll their own italic variant. Involves more editing afterwards, but the combination of slanting and rotating is the first step in a widespread obliquification method. If that’s a word.

Looks simple, and it is indeed easy to use, but it is immensely powerful: Filter → Simplify redraws shapes for you with fewer points. Experiment with the two values, and convert your Pencil tool (B) sketches or your vectorized scans into font-friendly, high-quality béziers. It’s amazing.

The new Window → Text Preview has a bunch of typographic features: change the text alignment, line height, tracking, even colors, activate and deactivate OpenType features, put your font through all the typographic mangling it is going to go through after release—without leaving the app.

As before, Text Preview is for previewing long texts that would otherwise slow down Edit view. It is still quite snappy in reacting to changes in the main window. Especially on more recent hardware, fonts update instantly. What you see is the variable or static font family with all its bells and whistles.

Here’s a little gimmick: you can, for instance, tear off the controls and adjust your variable font sliders in a detached panel.

It’s true, we have a new file format. Choose File → New Icon Set and you get a Glyphs file optimized for image export. To differentiate from font files, we are using the .glyphsicons file name suffix. You can export as PNG, SVG and PDF. Instead of font metrics, you will get image dimensions to work with, but all the tools are the same, including interpolating between multiple masters.

We believe the glyph principle with the components and batch editing that Glyphs provides, puts a lot of power into the hands of icon designers. Expect to see a lot more icons, pictographs and pictograms designed with Glyphs.

By the way, you can also export images from a regular .glyphs font file: when you export with File → Export… (⌘E), you will find the same Images option that a .glyphsicons file will give you. Pick to export the current glyph, the currently selected glyphs, or all the glyphs as images, and boom.

You can now collapse Font Info sections for better overview and less scrolling. Once you are done with the General settings, well, click them away with the little triangle button, and they are out of sight. Cannot accidentally change anything anymore, and no need to scroll for kilometers in order to access all your custom parameters.

The help button for a custom parameter or general setting makes the respective documentation accessible at all times. Not just in the moment you add it. And did you see the activation switches? Clearly distinguishable from the boolean-value checkboxes, and when deactivated, Glyphs will simply fall back to the default, as if the parameter had not been added.

Perhaps you also noticed in the screenshot that you can add the vertical metrics now to Font Info → Font. No need to repeat them in every master anymore.

This is one of the few moments that type historians will remember as turning points in font production. That is because axis particles are going to make your multi-axis life so much easier. Or if you never dared to interpolate across more than one axis, well, we invite you to try again.

Font Info → Masters: the Add Masters… menu item will let you set up your masters according to your design space. Let me explain. So, after setting up your axes, let’s say a Width and a Weight axis, you switch to the Masters tab in Font Info, and pick Add Masters… from the plus menu in the bottom left. Glyphs will ask you for master particles per axis, effectively the names for the minimum and maximum positions on each axis. For Width, this could be ‘Narrow’ and ‘Wide’, for Weight, this could be ‘Light’ and ‘Heavy’, or whatever floats your boat, plus the respective axis position for each particle:

Glyphs will now proceed to declinate your masters for you, by recombining and multiplying the particles with each other: Narrow Light, Narrow Heavy, Wide Light, Wide Heavy. All of them with the correct coordinates:

Amazing. But it does not stop there. Because you can do the same thing with your instances! Switch to the Export tab, and choose Add Particle Setting from the menu:

Now proceed to add ‘stops’ or ‘particles’ for each axis, i.e. pick positions along each axis and give them a name particle, e.g., Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold, and Heavy on the Weight axis, and Condensed, Regular, Wide on the Width axis. Like this approximately:

You are guessing it, Glyphs can now recombine these particles with each other, and proceed to declinate the whole font family for you. The word ‘Regular’, however, is elidable, meaning that it disappears when recombined with another word. If two Regular particles come together, that would technically produce an empty name, and if that happens, the fallback name kicks in, which is the name of the particle setting (in General):

The cool thing: this works for both static and variable font exports. And you save a lot of time once you have a second axis.

Here is my favorite part. Yes, there’s a bunch of really great features that deserve their spotlight. But there are also hundreds of small improvements, that do not get as much attention. Though they will affect your workflow, since they make up the everyday tasks you handle. And we are sure you will appreciate the positive influence they will have on your life.

Glyph colors, in case you use them, are now clearly distinguished from the selection color:

When you select a bunch of glyphs to rename them (⌘⇧F), and they all share a part of their name with each other (e.g. .001 after duplicating), that part is preemptively filled as the Find text, and the cursor is already blinking in the Replace field. We call this predictive replacement. If you are adding a lot of alternates, this will save you time, clicks, typing and more importantly, nerves.

Have you noticed the subtle export indicators? No more accidental editing of deactivated glyphs when you are stepping through your glyph set.

Character info in the glyph info box (⌘⇧I) is now more compact, and it gives you more Unicode info straight away, without opening the UnicodeChecker tool. And you get to preview the character in any installed font that has a glyph for it:

Duplicate shapes are now indicate with a subtle purple tint. Accidental double pastes? You’ll notice them straight away:

By default, Font view uses the default system font for glyph names:

But you know, that system font is a variable font with a Width axis. And can change Glyphs → Settings… → Advanced → Glyph name font width to a factor of, say, 0.6. That pulls the Width slider much more to the left, and that means you see more of long glyph names. Let’s face it, add a script suffix and one or two feature suffixes, and you’ll bust the grid. Now not as often:

Anybody notice the new compact toolbar? Much cleaner, takes up less space. We grouped them differently, with the most relevant one on top.

Shortcuts still work, however we did remove the A shortcut for the Annotations tool and the I shortcut for the TT Instructor. Because we found out that most activations of these tools have been unintentional. Remember, you can always set your own shortcuts in Glyphs → Settings… → Shortcuts. That includes tool shortcuts.

Running scripts has seen a few enhancements. For what it’s worth, the Script menu now shows the three most recently used scripts. Don’t worry, the ⌘⇧R shortcut still triggers the most recent one. Hint: hold down the Opt (⌥) key while navigating the Script menu, and you can choose to reveal the respective .py file in Finder rather than running the script itself. Very useful for debugging. And learning Python.

Speaking of which, did you notice that the Settings have way more options now? You can customize pretty much all the colors in both Light and Dark Mode, even store them as presets—and exchange them with others.

Have you spent a lot of time getting your settings right in Glyphs 3? No problem, go to Settings → Updates and click on Import from Glyphs 3… You are welcome.

While you are browsing the Settings window, do take a moment to activate Send Crash Reports, and fill in a name (optional) and an e-mail address (optional). If the app crashes, the developers automatically get a crash report that tells them where exactly in the app things started to go wrong. If you add your e-mail address, the developers can get back to you. They may ask you for a copy of the file you had open in the moment the app crashed.

We completely redesigned Window → Glyph Info, and we hope, for the better. Better search, more info, and the ability to show the character in any installed font.

Speaking of exports, Glyphs now fully supports CFF2 variable font export. Great day for humanity, innit. So now you do not need to rely on TrueType conversion anymore for variable fonts. While we were at it, we added a small but important checkbox: Show file in Finder after export. The option is available in most export tabs. And you guessed it, it does exactly what it says.

In case you were wondering, yes, the Variable Font Test HTML mekkablue script is already updated to also accept CFF2 exports. If you have not used it in a while, give it another go, it has lots of new gimmicks now. Also, ABC Dinamo’s Font Gauntlet works perfectly fine with CFF2 fonts.

Oh, and did you see? SF Symbols are back for good and built-in out of the box.

Window → Plugin Manager has a much snappier new UI. You can filter for plug-in type and for installation status, and you will appreciate a better, faster search. By default, the extensions are sorted by the date of the most recent changes, so you always get the newest and most recently updated scripts and plug-ins at the top.

Many plug-ins now install instantly, without the need to restart. Especially View menu extensions, so-called reporters, install really smoothly. Analogously, installing scripts does not require you to run Reload Scripts anymore. They appear in the Script menu right away.

Most existing plug-ins should work in Glyphs 4 out of the box, without any extra changes. However, some will need small adjustments. Make yourself heard in the forum, if your favorite plug-in does not work anymore.

While you are at it, open Plugin Manager and give it a good scroll: dozens of new plug-ins have been added this year! And there’s likely something in it for you as well.

Coders rejoice, for the Scripting window hath been completely redone. Yes, that is what it is called now, but the shortcut stayed the same: ⌘⌥M.

You will notice that autocompletion now gets the parentheses right. After you type an opening quote, bracket, brace or round parenthesis, the cursor is automatically placed between both. And when you type any of those when text is selected, it wraps the text in them rather than replacing the selection.

The instant macros you write are automatically saved as separate .py files now. They can be renamed, duplicated, shared, whatever you like. And resetting your app preferences will not kill them anymore.

The Scripting window allows you to edit any Python code in every installed script and plug-in! Just drill down to the .py file you are interested in, right there in the left sidebar, click on it, and boom, the code becomes visible—and editable.

The window sports a much bigger draggable separator with options. I.e. it is near-impossible to miss with your mouse pointer. It also carries a few extra functions:

From left to right:

• Breakpoint: click on a line number to add a breakpoint in code, and toggle it with the breakpoint icon. That means when you run it, the execution of the script pauses at the breakpoint. You can then choose to let it continue to run until you hit the following breakpoint or keep stepping forward or backward through the code. This can be very useful if you are trying to hunt down a bug, especially in flow control.
• Python style options: click the three-dot menu to fine-tune your indentation style (tabs vs. spaces, etc.), check on your Python version, or install Ruff and Pyright from separator options. Ruff is a code reviewer. It checks whether your code follows common style rules, points out suspicious patterns, it is the tool that says, “this code works, but it could be cleaner and more consistent”. Pyright is a type checker. It looks at type annotations such as  str ,  int , or  list[str]  and warns you when your code seems to use the wrong type before you run it. It’s the tool that says, “this value looks like a string, but you’re using it like a number”.
• Snippets and the snippets folder are accessible from the three-line icon.
• Clear console: the broom icon cleans the output area.
• Toggle console: the rightmost icon lets you retract the output console altogether, so you can focus on coding.

Yes. Glyphs remains a single purchase with a permanent license. No subscription.

After about a decade of keeping the prices the same, we did a partial inflation adjustment. Not really, because inflation in that time frame was between 30% and 40% in most parts of the world, and we are adjusting the price by not even 7%. This is how we do our part in bringing inflation down.

As always, you can run Glyphs for 30 days without a license. A full license costs USD/EUR 319, discounts are available for students (USD/EUR 159) and teachers (USD/EUR 199). There are school, volume and site licensing options available. Upgrading from a previous version of Glyphs is the same as the teacher price, USD/EUR 199.

Do you have Glyphs 3 running on your Mac? As I am writing this, the upgrade e-mails containing your discount vouchers are going out, batch by batch. Look in the inbox of the e-mail you registered your license with. You should have received an e-mail from upgrade at glyphsapp dot com. Nothing there? Consider adding the upgrade e-mail address to your contacts, and look in your spam folder. We added a separate page with everything there is to know about upgrading.

…but now is the time for you to download Glyphs 4 and try for yourself. You will need macOS 12 or later on your Mac. Have fun. Create. Enjoy the process.

Big shoutout to the nice people at Plau, Resistenza, Schultzschultz and all the other designers who were so kind to provide samples of their work. And a round of applause for the amazing Mexican design studio Enigma, who did the design for Glyphs 4, including the new logo and app icon.

Stay sane, stay safe.

Stay tuned 😏