How to get glyphs ↩

FontParts

This page gives an overview of the different ways to get a glyph object.

Asking a font for a glyph

A font behaves like a dictionary, with glyph names as keys and glyph objects as values. If we have a font object, we can ask it for one of its glyphs by name:

font = CurrentFont()
glyph = font['A']
print(glyph)

<RGlyph at 4724219600>

Adding a new glyph to a font

We can also ask a font to create a new glyph with a given name:

f.newGlyph('hello')

If a glyph with this name already exists in the font, it will be overwritten.

Current glyph

As with CurrentFont, we can get the glyph which is currently open in the Glyph Window:

glyph = CurrentGlyph()
print(glyph)

<RGlyph at 4663441680>
  • If several Glyph Windows are open, CurrentGlyph will return the one at the top.
  • If no Glyph Window is open:
    • If one glyph is selected in the Font Overview, that glyph will be returned.
    • If no glyph or several glyphs are selected in the Font Overview, None will be returned.

RGlyph

The RGlyph object can be used to create a new ‘orphan’ glyph which does not belong to any font. This can be useful as an intermediate step in a transformation, for example. When we’re done, we can insert the glyph into a font using font.insertGlyph.

# create a new orphan glyph
glyph = RGlyph()

# do something to the glyph...

# insert the into a font
font.insertGlyph(glyph, name='hi')

Getting selected glyphs

If a font is open in the inteface, we can select one or more glyphs in the Font Overview. We can get the selected glyphs as a list of glyph names, or as a list of glyph objects.

f = CurrentFont()

# get selected glyphs as glyph objects
for glyph in f.selectedGlyphs:
    print(glyph)

<RGlyph 'a' ('foreground') at 4705008216>
<RGlyph 'c' ('foreground') at 5186352520>
<RGlyph 'd' ('foreground') at 5186352128>
<RGlyph 'b' ('foreground') at 5186353024>

# get selected glyphs as glyph names
for glyph in f.selectedGlyphNames:
    print(glyph)

a
b
c
d

Getting all glyphs in a font

If we need to access all glyphs in the order in which they appear in a font, we can use the glyphOrder attribute to get a list of glyph names:

f = CurrentFont()

for glyphName in f.glyphOrder:
    print(glyphName)

space
A
Agrave
Aacute
Acircumflex
Atilde
Adieresis
...

Getting template glyphs

Template glyphs are placeholders for creating new glyphs in the Font Overview. There are a few ways to access them from a script:

font.templateGlyphOrder
Returns the font’s glyph order including template glyphs.
font.templateGlyphs
Returns all template glyphs in the font as a list of glyph objects.
font.templateSelectedGlyphNames
Returns the names of all selected glyphs in the font including template glyphs.
Last edited on 01/09/2021
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