Version 2 is here!

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After about a year and a half of development, Glyphr Studio Version 2.0.0 is finally ready for center stage. Thank you to everyone who submitted ideas and feedback on all the V2 Alpha and Beta releases – you all had a huge impact on quality and stability of the new app!

Because Glyphr Studio has been around for (checks notes) more than 12 years, we aren’t just going to suddenly drop v1 and move on. We have a detailed transition plan you can read more about here, but just know that v1 will still be available even after the switch to v2.

What’s new since V2.0.0-beta.2.1?

The main release criteria for v2 was being able to open more than one project, and do stuff between them. These are the big new features, but there was a bunch of other stuff added as well:

  • From the Projects menu, open a second project, and be able to switch between them.
  • New Cross-project Actions, that allow you to move or overwrite shapes, characters, ligatures, components, kern groups, and settings – from one project to another.
  • No longer a limit to the Basic Multilingual Plane (Unicode through U+FFFF), any character from any plane can now be added as a character range.
  • Transform Origin control for resizing shapes and glyphs. No longer are items resized by the lower-left corner by default. A grid of origins are available, and the default is now baseline-left.
  • Modern file loading/saving – saving a file now directly overwrites the project file that was opened, instead of downloading a text file for every save.
  • Auto save – using the browser’s local storage, automatically save the latest change for each project. And have the ability to restore projects from the Open Project page.
  • PANOSE builder – progressive drop-downs help you build the PANOSE number for your font.
  • New Kern Group actions let you search for or delete a specific letter pair.

… and a lot of bug fixes.

Summary of all the other updates

Just so I can link to one blog post that has all the changes in one place, here is an aggregate of new features that were released over the Alpha and Beta time-frames:

Beta 2.1

  • Rotate shapes with the rotation handle affordance on the edit canvas.
  • Rotate Component Instances via the rotate property.
  • Add Path Point tool lets you hover over an existing path and add a new point anywhere along the path you want.
  • New Global Actions: Set all Side Bearings, and Round All.

Beta 2

  • 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.

Beta 1

  • Components – Use any glyph as a Component Root, or define stand-alone Components. Add these to any other glyph as Component Instances. Edit the Root, all the instances are also updated.
  • Ligatures (Including import/export from OTF) – define a sequence of characters that will be recognized and replaced with a new specially designed character.

Alpha 2

  • Save and load a Glyphr Studio Project file (.gs2) If you have a recent Glyphr Studio v1 Project file (v1.13.02 or later) you can open that v1 project file in the v2 app. It will get converted into a v2 project file!
  • On the new Settings page, make updates to Project, App, or Font properties.
  • On the new Live Preview page, you can see how your new font looks as sentences or blocks of text.
  • Import a font file – try out OTF, TTF, WOFF, or SVG Font.
  • Export a font file – either OTF or SVG Font.

Alpha 1

  • Basic app UI and Navigation framework.
  • Basic Edit Canvas controls.

Thank you!

It’s been quite a ride to get v2 out the door. Glyphr Studio greatly benefits from people like you giving us feedback and sharing your ideas. Please feel free to reach out any time at mail@glyphrstudio.com – and thank you!

🎉