This might be a stupid question but I just don’t get the way anchors work in RoboFont. I’m new to font editing, I’ve never used FontLab but I’ve seen tutorials about how anchors work there. I understand the purpose of anchors and I understand how FontLab is dealing with it but in RoboFont things seem to work differently and I can’t figure out how.

I’d like to use them to position diacritics. So I placed one anchor in the base glyph “ a ” and named it “top” and another in the accent glyph “ ¨ ” named “_top”. Then I built the “ ä ” by adding “a” and “¨” as components to the empty “ä“ glyph. This is kind of the FontLab way and it doesn’t work.
After trying other combinations without success and failing in research on the web on this specific topic here I am.

Is there an out-of-the-box-behaviour for anchors or are they supposed to be accessed by scripts in order to use them?

Thanks for your help

Andreas