A Glyphs 3 reporter plugin for live, Figma-style measurement in the Edit View: stem/edge thickness and point-to-point X/Y distances. It draws only while you hold Option, and what it shows depends on whether a single node is selected.
Plugin Manager (recommended). In Glyphs, open Window → Plugin Manager, find Ultimate Measure, click Install, and relaunch Glyphs.
Manual / from source. Download or clone this repo and put
UltimateMeasure.glyphsReporter in your Plugins folder (Glyphs → Settings →
Addons shows its location, or ~/Library/Application Support/Glyphs 3/Plugins/),
then relaunch. If you installed from a downloaded zip and macOS blocks the bundle
on first launch (Plugin Manager installs aren't affected):
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Glyphs 3/Plugins/UltimateMeasure.glyphsReporter"
Turn it on once in View → Ultimate Measure. Nothing shows until Option is held.
Hold Option and move near an outline. A perpendicular ray measures the stem or edge under the cursor: a pink tag where the span crosses ink, grey across a counter. The origin snaps to a nearby on-curve node (within ~10 px) and locks to that node's curve normal, so it holds steady rather than wobbling.
At a corner the perpendicular is ambiguous, so it switches to axis legs: the lengths of the straight segments meeting at that corner (curve legs are skipped — the chord to the next point isn't useful), coloured blue for the horizontal leg and purple for the vertical. Hovering just outside a corner, or inside between features, snaps to the vertex instead of firing a diagonal.
Option + Shift — full slice: measure every gap across the outline along the ray, not just the nearest stem.
Everything in this mode is measured on the visible outline: a cached, overlap-removed, decomposed copy of the layer. So overlapping shapes and components are handled, and overlap crossings behave as real corners.
Select a node, hold Option, and hover any node, handle, or overlap corner within ~10 px. It shows the horizontal (blue, 003BFF) and vertical (purple, 8000FF) distance from the selected node to that point, drawn as a right-angle connector with the remaining two sides of the rectangle dashed. A leg that is zero is omitted. (Selecting more than one node falls back to the stem ruler.)
Hidden
Option + Command draws nothing — that combination is Glyphs' zoom gesture.
The behaviour constants — snap and catch radii, dot size, tag geometry, fade
duration and so on — are at the top of Contents/Resources/plugin.py, each
commented. Edit and restart Glyphs.
- Errors print to Window → Macro Panel with an
UltimateMeasure:prefix. - The overlap-removed copy is rebuilt only when the outline changes, so hovering stays cheap; very heavy glyphs may still cost a little on the first rebuild.
A Python port and substantial extension of StemThickness by Rafał Buchner, with code samples by Georg Seifert, Rainer Scheichelbauer and Mark Frömberg. https://github.com/RafalBuchner/StemThickness — the Python loader stub is from the GlyphsSDK. Licensed under the Apache License 2.0, as the original.