Mass-edit for Glyph Info > Mark for Unlink, Remove Overlap Before Save attribute

[ultrasquid]

• When more than one glyph is selected in the Font window, Edit>Glyph Info is grayed out.
  But there is at least one attribute that would be convenient to toggle en-masse: "Mark for Unlink, Remove Overlap Before Save".
  (Because it's a pain to go through a big font and tick that on for every accented and compounded letter after a while.)
• That word "Save" should be changed to "Generating Font", since that's what it does, really. It won't unlink and remove overlap just when saving to SFD, and that wouldn't be desirable anyway.
• We should never remove overlap when generating UFO ("Mark for Unlink, Remove Overlap before generating" is ticked)

[davelab6]

Mark for Unlink, Remove Overlap Before Save

Which formats is this required for?

[adrientetar]

Dave, it is required when you create composite glyphs and want to export to Postscript/TTF. It prevents rasterizer bugs and more expensive computations and it allows to have integer intersection points (speaking of which, there should an option to round to integer too — this can be done from a script but when you want to export from the UI without to set up things beforehand...).

[adrientetar]

If we add an FDK export mode though (#1995) it should perform remove overlap [and evetually round to integer] according to what is ticked here.

[davelab6]

I propose this solution for 1:

Add a FontView Element submenu "Before Save," that is disabled when no glyph is selected, and when 1+ glyph is selected, is enabled and has an item inside, "Mark for Unlink, Remove Overlap Before Save", which is checked if 100% of the selection has the property set, and toggles this property

[davelab6]

Perhaps there should be 3 properties - remove overlap, round to int, and unlink?

[davelab6]

We should never remove overlap when generating UFO ("Mark for Unlink, Remove Overlap before generating" is ticked)

Why not? If the user selected this, its Working As Intended, no?

[adrientetar]

Why not? If the user selected this, its Working As Intended, no?

The user probably selected this so that FontForge removes overlap when generating e.g. an OTF. But UFO is a source format, if anything its remove overlap facility shouldn't be coupled with the one for gen. files.

[davelab6]

Should this be set by default?

[adrientetar]

Should this be set by default?

Sorry? I did not understand.

[davelab6]

Should this property be turned on by default?

[adrientetar]

For generated files (OTF and the likes) I'd say yes, or at least I can't think of a situation where you would want to keep overlap in generated files.

[khaledhosny]

If you are using references to minimise file size, you might want to keep the overlap.

[davelab6]

unlink will dereference them though, losing that file saving?

[khaledhosny]

Of course, that is why this should not be done by default. Anyway, I don’t like my tools doing things I didn’t ask for, who knows when I have a good reason to keep things the way they are.

[adrientetar]

I agree.

[ultrasquid]

Most features that make mass changes should be off by default, but should
also have handy tooltips explaining why one might want to turn them on

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Adrien Tétar notifications@github.com
wrote:

I agree.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1008 (comment)
.

Jason Pagura
zimbach at gmail dot com

[davelab6]

Okay, I agree :)

[ultrasquid]

Has anyone figured this one out? I just want to be able to select multiple glyphs in the Font view and toggle the attribute.