Composite and Auto Glyphs»

Components»

A Component in FontLab is an element that points to the same layer of another glyph, the Component’s source glyph, and “borrows” (inherits) the source glyph’s contents (contours). If you change the source glyph, all components in other glyphs that point to the source glyph will update. If you’ve used Components any other font editor, you’ll find yourself at home easily.

A Component has its own transformation (usually shift, optionally also scale, rotation or slant).

Components are great if you build composite glyphs from other glyphs. For example, you can Adieresis from the Components A and dieresiscomb. You can use nested Components that point to glyphs that are made of Components, so for example, you can build a dieresiscomb glyph from two dotaccentcomb Components, and then build Adieresis from the Components A and dieresiscomb.

You can build composite glyphs from Components in one or all masters — via Generate Glyphs, Add Component, Copy-Paste or Auto Layers. You can mix Components and other elements (including Contour elements) within the same glyph layer.

FontLab will keep your Component structure when it exports your font to a format that supports components (TTF, VFB, UFO), and will decompose Components as needed when a format does not support components at all, or does not support some aspects such as rotated Components or Components mixed with contours.

Previous versions of FontLab VI simulated components using Element References, by locking some references and dynamically finding the best candidate glyph for a component source. But this was never a fully satisfying experience, so we’ve decided to add Components as a separate element type.

Element References»

Element References work great when you want to re-use a design pieces such as a stem, a serif or other glyph fragments (contours or images) across multiple glyphs in the same layer, and maintain a link between all the places where you’ve placed it. You can use Element References to work with repeatable shapes across a font. All Element References are equal. There is no source glyph to which they point to — they all link to each other. Element References have no knowledge about glyph metrics or anchors. In a way, they’re very similar to subroutines used in PostScript-flavored (CFF) OpenType fonts.

FontLab VI 6.1 has both Components and Element References, each to fit its purpose.

You can build composite glyphs from Components in one or all masters — via Generate Glyphs, Add Component, Copy-Paste or Auto Layers. You can mix Components and simple contours in one layer. You can use nested Components that point to glyphs that are made of Components (for example, you can build a dieresiscomb glyph from two dotaccentcomb Components, and then build Adieresis from the Components A and dieresiscomb).

FontLab VI will keep your Component structure when it exports your font to a format that supports components (TTF, VFB, UFO), and will decompose Components as needed when a format does not support components at all, or does not support some aspects such as rotated Components or Components mixed with contours.

Any element can be referenced in multiple glyphs. Each element reference shares the same contours, element guides and pins, but has its unique transformation (position, scale, rotation, slant) as well as, for color fonts, its own fill color and stroke color and thickness.

Element > Add Element Reference… will open a dialog which allows you to select and insert elements by glyph names in the list:

Start typing the glyph name and then choose the element you need from the list. When you click on OK, a reference to that element will be pasted to the current glyph layer.

Element references (or references) are linked. If you edit the contents of one reference, the other references change as well.

Element references can work like traditional components. You place an unlocked reference to an element in a primary glyph (such as A). There, you can edit the contours. Then, you place locked references to the same element in other glyphs (e.g. Aacute, Adieresis). When you try to edit the contents of a locked reference, FontLab will open the primary glyph where you can modify the contours, and the changes will propagate to all the locked references. So locked references behave like TrueType, UFO or VFB components.

However, you can always unlock some or all of the locked references. Then, you can also edit the contours in-place in each unlocked reference, and the changes of the element contents will propagate to all references including the one in the primary glyph. So in fact, the primary glyph is just one of the glyphs that contains a reference to a given element where that reference is unlocked. If a reference is unlocked only in one primary glyph, FontLab will use that glyph as the contour glyph when generating fonts in formats that support components (TrueType-flavored OpenType, VFB or UFO), while all the other references will be exported as components. If you unlock more than one reference, FontLab will automatically pick the best contour glyph.

If a glyph is an auto glyph in the current layer or master (i.e. the current layer has the Auto layer property turned on in the Layers and Masters panel), then FontLab tries to automatically build the contents of the layer by adding anchors, adding and positioning element references from the primary glyphs, and by inheriting the sidebearings of the base glyphs. As long as the layer is an auto layer, you cannot manually edit or position the metrics, any anchor, guide, element or its contents — but you can define a custom glyph generation recipe to tell FontLab how the layer should be generated. If you turn the Auto layer property off, you will be able to edit the contents of the glyph.

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