TL:DR – you can now show/hide character ranges, which controls what characters get exported to fonts. There are new settings toggles to export Ligatures and Kerning data to fonts as well. You can also delete all the characters from a range. And, you can now delete glyphs that act as component roots.
Starting a project from scratch usually limits the overall number of items you are working with… but if you are trying to remix an existing font, sometimes those projects can explode to have thousands of characters.
One of the nice things in v2 is that, on import, we’ll automatically create and group characters into their standard Unicode character ranges. These can bee seen on the Settings > Project page.
But before this release, all you could do is see a list of them. In this release, lots of advancements were made in dealing with character ranges. A new show/hide concept was introduced – hidden character ranges will save the project data for those characters, but they won’t be exported to fonts or displayed in the UI. If you want to go a step further, you can delete characters within a range – this will remove project data, making your .gs2 save file smaller.
With this fine grain control over what characters get exported to fonts, there is also a related feature for Ligatures and Kerning. On the Settings > App page, you can now toggle if these get exported to fonts.
And, lastly, a feature sneaked in – in order to enable deleting a whole range of characters, we had to somehow deal with component roots and component instances. Previously, we just disabled character delete if that character was also a component root (linked to other characters as a component instance). Now we have a new default behavior: when a component root gets deleted, we also find all the other characters that were linked to the root, and turn those component instances into stand-alone paths. The result is that the linked glyphs will look the same. There is a new option in Settings > App where you can change this behavior. The other option is that if you delete a glyph that is a component root, all the component instances where it was linked to are also just deleted. The other glyphs will end up having less shapes and will look different.
Also, this bug fix
- Fixed a bug in exporting to OTF where the
spacecharacter was being interpreted as the.notdefcharacter