Handful of questions for new Robofont User

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This topic contains 4 replies, has 3 voices, and was last updated by  jfinks 6 years, 5 months ago.

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  • April 29, 2014 at 17:42 #5880

    jfinks
    Member

    Hi Frederik,

    I finally purchased a Robofont license, and i’m in the middle of trying to move from Fontlab to Robofont, but i’m having a bit of a hard time trying to figure out/find a few features…

    1) Is there any way of finding out the horizontal and vertical distance between two points without using the measurement tool? I’ve attached a little screenshot from Fontlab, where i’ve highlighted 2 points that are some distance from each other, and it shows they are horizontally 207 points apart, and 224 points apart.

    This may seem like a small feature, but for my workflow, it was always indispensable in Fontlab. For example, it is really nice being able to see if a point is centered on a curve, or how far off center it is without having to actually do the math between x or y coordinates (the angle degree is nice as well, but not super important).

    2) Is there any way of changing the background color of the background layer, or any additional layers? In the Appearances tab for the Glyph View in Preferences, you can change the Background Color for your main foreground layer, but it doesn’t seem like the background color is changeable for any of the other layers? I can see that when I swap to the background layer, it is ever so slightly grey, but when using a Hot Key to jump between the layers I find it difficult to immediately tell which layer i’m on without having to look up at the top bar and read which layer.

    3) Is there a way to clear the background layer without having to go to that layer, selecting all contours, deleting, and then going back to the foreground? While working on the foreground layer, I often delete the background (mask layer), copy my main foreground layer to the back, and continue working without ever leaving the foreground.

    4) Also, is there a way of killing/ending a script once it has been run? Basically, I’ve been installing a few scripts i’ve found online, but some of them I’d like to have stop running after i’ve used it for its intended purpose, but I can’t seem to find a way to do that without shutting down Robofont and re-opening it. Am I missing something?

    Thanks so much for your help!!!

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    April 30, 2014 at 09:14 #5883

    Jeremie
    Member

    for 1) you can use my ‘Properties’ extension: https://github.com/sansplomb/RobofontTools/tree/master/Properties
    I shows in the upper right corner of the glyph window the distances between selected points, the distances of bcps, the number of contours, the number of ON curve points, and the number of OFF curve points. I use it all the time now.

    May 1, 2014 at 20:37 #5884

    jfinks
    Member

    Awesome, thanks Jeremie, that works great for my first problem!

    May 2, 2014 at 12:53 #5885

    frederik
    Keymaster

    Hi

    1.
    maybe some other options

    you can enable “Curve Length” to display distances between points or use this example code https://github.com/typemytype/RoboFontExamples/blob/master/observers/drawSelectedPointDistances.py

    2.
    The background of each layer is coloured with a tiny of the layer color. Maybe the tint value should be a (hidden) preference.

    3.
    Write a simple script and assign a short key to it:

    g = CurrentGlyph()
backgroundGlyph =g.getLayer("background")
backgroundGlyph.clear()

    4.
    Not in the current version. I already tried several options but nothing worked good enough to be a perfect script-killer.

    Good luck

    May 2, 2014 at 18:00 #5886

    jfinks
    Member

    Thanks for your help Frederik.

    One more quick question for now…

    Is there any way to assign keyboard shortcuts to the layer visibility buttons in the Inspector, specifically the little eyeball button that turns on and off the contour in the background?

    Basically, it would be nice to be able to be on the foreground, and turn on and off the background visibility without having to go over to the Inspector every time.

    Thanks!
    Josh

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