Building similar glyphs using Elements»

Elements are building blocks of every glyph layer. They can be of different types based on their content — Contour, Image, Sticker, etc. Today we are discussing Contour Elements. A Contour Element contains a collection of one or more contours, and can be used to build similar glyphs in a more efficient way.

Take for instance the lowercase n, m and r of a typeface. All three glyphs use the same design for the leftmost vertical stem. Won’t your workflow become easier if you could make adjustments to this stem in one glyph, and have these changes be applied automatically to the other two? This is done easily using Elements and Element References. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create the stem as a separate Element in one of the glyphs, says n, and then use references to this Element in the other two glyphs.

Let’s see how this can be done –

Open the lowercase n in the Glyph Window. Go to View > Element Frame to turn on Element Frames. They will let you see the names of your Elements and whether they are locked or not – more on that later in this tutorial. Whenever you draw a contour in the Glyph Window, it gets added to the current Element. Since the glyph is empty right now, anything you draw will be added to a new Element. Draw the leftmost stem in this Element.

Now create a new Element, in which you will draw the shoulder and right stem of the letter. To create a new Element, choose Element > New Element or use the keyboard shortcut CtrlS. Then, continue drawing. Remember that the Element tool, which represented by a black arrow, and accessed by the keyboard shortcut V, is used to select and move Elements in the Glyphs Window.

Once you are finished drawing, open the Elements panel by going to Window > Panels > Elements. In the Elements panel, you will see that the n is made out of two elements. Select the element which contains the left stem (it will get highlighted with a dark outline in the Glyph Window), and enter a name, say “n_left_stem,” for it in the Name input field.

Go back to the Font Window, and this time open the lowercase m in the Glyph Window. Here, open the Gallery panel by going to Window > Panel > Gallery. The Gallery panel contains all the named elements of your font. So, you will see the element “n_left_stem” here, but not the (unnamed) element in which you drew the shoulder and right stem of the n.

Select the element “n_left_stem” in the _Gallery panel_ (it will get highlighted in blue in the panel), and then click Place. You now have an Element Reference of “n_left_stem” in the glyph m. Follow the same steps to place the _Element Reference_ in the r.

When an Element Reference is added to a new glyph, it is locked and cannot be edited. To unlock it, click on the lock icon in the Element Frame. Once you have unlocked the references, you can edit any of them to propagate the changes to all other references.

!!! Element References are a new concept in FontLab VI, and they are best understood as linked copies of an element. This means that all Element References are equal to each other, and modifications made to any one gets reflected in all others. They are unlike Components, which have been a long-standing, standards-compliant way to build glyphs from other glyphs. Components point to a single source glyph, while Elements References don’t. In addition, Components contain information about glyph metrics and anchors in the source glyph. This is not the case for the Element References.

All images in this tutorial use Dunwich Type Founders’ Rhodium Libre.