Flagging Glyphs
A color flag adds a visible mark to a glyph's cell. It can make a review group recognizable before you read any names, or show which drawings you intend to inspect next.
The color is a project convention: you decide whether green means “approved” or red means “needs correction.” Assigning a color does not make FontLab perform that assessment.
Color Flags
A color flag is a visual organization mark. It does not alter a glyph's outlines, Unicode assignments, or OpenType behavior, and it is not a color fill applied to the rendered letterform.
The standard picker provides red, blue, green, magenta, and cyan choices, together with access to other colors. Themes and selection overlays can affect their appearance in the interface. In the collapsed Glyph panel, a background tint behind the glyph-name icon indicates the flag. A cell’s flag is independent of whether that cell is selected or current.
Flags and tags overlap as ways to find groups, but they serve different purposes. A tag gives a reusable group a text name and can participate in configured structural workflows. A flag supplies a visible color for organization. Neither should be mistaken for proof that a glyph has passed a particular check.
The Font window Property Bar can filter by flag; see Font Filters and Searching the Glyph Set. Flags are retained with working font data. They are not the color data used by a finished color font and have no automatic meaning in ordinary rendered text. Font-level comparison colors in Font Map are a separate mechanism.
Applying and Removing Flags
To apply a flag:
- Select the intended glyph cells in the Font window.
- Use the Color Flag picker or a visible color button in the Property Bar—or on the compact Toolbar if the controls have moved there.
- Check that the selected cells show the expected marking.
With a Font window active, the right side of a docked compact Toolbar can show the Color Flag picker, the extended color buttons, the small flag-search arrow, and Search, in that order. The extended color buttons hide first when space narrows; the compact picker remains available until it too must return to the Property Bar. The Glyph window can move its Color Flag picker and Search to the same side of the Toolbar.
Moving a flag control does not change its selection or layer scope. In the Font window, the small arrow beside the flag controls puts the current flag into Search, so you can find matching glyphs.
The Glyph > Flag submenu provides another route to flag choices. The Font and Glyph window context menus also contain a visual color-flag picker; choose the color there for the current selection. For a color outside the standard set, open the picker's additional color choices and choose the required color.
To remove a flag, select the glyphs and use No flag, or the equivalent None choice in the Flag submenu. Removing the flag removes the organization mark; it does not delete the glyph or reset its other metadata.
When a selection contains mixed flags, the control can show a neutral or empty combined state. Inspect the cells rather than assuming that the whole selection is unflagged. Applying one color establishes the chosen flag according to the layer scope described below.
Flag commands can also be found by name in Tools > Commands & Shortcuts, opened with Cmd+Shift+P on macOS or Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows. Search for the intended flag command, check its name, and invoke it for the selected cells. If you use a color repeatedly, that command can be assigned a shortcut through the shortcut-customization workflow.
Paste Special can transfer flags along with selected kinds of glyph data. Its checked options determine what else is transferred, so use it as a selective copy operation rather than assuming it copies color alone.
Flags in Multi-Master Fonts
A glyph can contain more than one layer or design. Different drawings of the same glyph may be at different stages, so a single uniform flag is not always enough.
FontLab distinguishes a fallback flag from a flag assigned specifically to a layer. The fallback supplies the ordinary marking where a layer has no separate choice. A custom layer flag lets that drawing retain its own status.
The flag picker supports three scopes:
| Gesture | Effect |
|---|---|
| Ordinary click | Changes the fallback and unflagged or fallback-matching layers; retains distinct custom layer flags |
| Shift-click | Applies the chosen flag across layers and the fallback, replacing custom layer flags |
| Option-click on macOS or Alt-click on Windows | Applies the flag to the current layer only |
For example, an ordinary color change can update the general review status while leaving a specially flagged layer visible as an exception. Shift-click removes that distinction by making the marking uniform. Use it only when that is the intended result.
The same scope distinction applies when removing a flag. An ordinary No flag action can leave separately flagged layers intact; Shift-clicking No flag removes the flag across layers, while Option/Alt-click limits removal to the current layer.
The Color Flag dialog provides explicit layer-scope choices as an alternative to modifier clicks. Check its current-layer/all-layer choice and whether custom layer flags are being kept before applying a change.
The flag dialog distinguishes Current Layer from All Layers, making the scope of the color change explicit.
You do not need a variable-font project to use ordinary flags. The layer distinction becomes relevant whenever different stored drawings of the same glyph should retain different review marks. Keep the intended scope in mind when moving between those drawings, because the visible cell color can change with the displayed layer.