Beta 2.0 is here, with an emphasis on the point-zero. The overall goal of V2 Beta-2 is to achieve feature parity with v1… but that’s just taking too long. In the interest of getting more new stuff in to everyone’s hands sooner, we’re releasing Beta 2.0 with the knowledge that it is still not complete, and with plans for Beta 2.1 in the near future.
Catch up on the MEGA POST saga: Alpha-1, Alpha-2, Beta-1
What’s new in Beta 2.0?
Here are the main new scenarios:
- Kerning – Kern Groups can be saved and loaded from project files, and the new Kerning page allows you to create, edit, and delete Kern Groups.
- Global Actions Page – see a whole list of actions that you can run which can apply changes across many characters at once.
- Context Characters – a new panel was added to Character and Ligature edit pages that allows you to display other characters around the glyph you are currently editing.
- Live Previews – now much improved in functionality, the Live Preview page has better scrolling options for sample text. Also a new Pop-out Window can be launched to display as many Live Previews as you want – great for seeing your changes in real time in a second window as you make edits in the main app window.
- Combine Shapes – now when you select two or more paths on the edit canvas, a “Combine shapes” action will allow you to merge multiple paths into as few paths as possible.
Like I said above, the overall goal of Beta 2 is feature parity with v1. But, it’s worth noting, the Live Previews functionality goes way above and beyond what’s currently available. In v1, the two-screen experience was broken down into one window of edit canvas, and the other window with all the panels and actions laid out horizontally. This, in practice, was not very useful. In v2, the two-screen experience will have the main window be exactly the same as the single-screen experience, but the pop-out window will be a highly-customizable set of Live Previews. This will allow you to make edits to a single glyph on one side, but then see your changes live in the other window. You can set up – for example – a large title sample at 48px, a medium two-sentence example at 24px, and a body-text example paragraph at 12px… and they will all update with every change you make in the main app window.
We need your feedback!
Having intrepid font designers like you trying out all the features in v2 is the main way we’ll be able to get to a stable product. Please let us know about anything that seems off, either big bugs or small annoyances – all feedback is good feedback! mail@glyphrstudio.com
Roadmap
It seems each time I include a ‘roadmap’ section in a Mega Post, it’s different than the last one. Oh well. We are very quickly narrowing in on feature parity with v1, this stuff will be shipped in Beta 2.1 – then we will be off to v2.0 with some fancy new multi-project stuff!
v2 Beta 2.1
- Rotate Shapes / Rotate Component Instances
- Custom guidelines
- A long list of bugs, covering many different areas
- Help Documentation that covers all of Beta 2
- Complete unit-test coverage (for better code stability / less bugs)
v2.0.0
- Open / switch between multiple projects
- Cross-project actions (like copy/paste glyph, and merge fonts)
- Switch the default App to v2. Main Site, Blog, and Socials switch to GS2 branding. V1 App, Tutorial, and Help are kept as a sub-directories.
Thanks!
The amount of mail and socials you fine folks have been sending in has been amazing. It’s always fantastic to hear from you – please let us know how Beta 2.0 is going! 🙌