Lots of little bug fixes over the past few months. Well, v2.1.8 that was just released had two improvements that may be considered features more than bugs… even though the functionality isn’t quite new.

Here’s a breakdown of the recent updates:

v2.1.8

New features

• Multi-select shapes from the Layers Panel by holding down Ctrl key.
• OTF Import now supports reading Kern data from GPOS type 2 table.

Bug fixes

• The 2nd screen Live Preview window now works in Firefox!
• Fixed an import and export SVG bug related to the Basic Latin Controls range.
• Fixed an import SVG bug related to the semicolon character.
• Advance Widths of zero can now be exported to OTF.

v2.1.7

Bug fixes

• On the Settings > Font page, made updates to the Font weight property. This was categorized as a “SVG Font” only property, but it does get exported to OTF files as well. Updated the inline help description for this property, and moved it into the “Other font metrics” section.
• Fixed an export bug in naming ligature characters. OTF glyphs have character restrictions for what a glyph’s name can be. Regular glyphs were being exported with appropriate “short” names, but the generated names for ligatures were (erroneously) using accented characters and some special characters.
• Added a warning about using Unicode characters above the BMP (U+FFFF) in ligatures. These characters will cause errors if you try to use them as ligature characters.

v2.1.6

Bug Fixes

• Importing two files, now the second project that gets created does not overwrite the first one.
• Handling the “Basic Latin Controls” Character Range, it can now be selected from dropdowns and can be hidden from the Settings > App page. Also updated the behavior of importing font files to automatically hide “Basic Latin Controls” range if it only has the 0x0 “.notdef” character.

v2.1.5

Bug fixes

• Quick patch to fix a bug with importing font metadata from OTF and WOFF
• Also some better back-end testing stuff

Did you see the progress on Color Fonts and Variable Fonts?

… oh, probably not. Unless you are helping out with Opentype.js, or stalking recent commits like I am. Opentype.js is the amazing library we use to read and write OTF files. It’s one of the key projects that makes Glyphr Studio possible. Because we rely on Opentype.js to work with font files, we are also limited to the features they currently support.

Recently there was a surge of contributions to the project. There are a lot of preview features to play with, but I’m hoping for an official Opentype.js v2 release soon. The exiting news, though, is that it looks like Color Font functionality has already been implemented, and Variable Font functionality is in the works.

Who knows, I may get tired of waiting for Opentype.js v2, and start to experiment with introducing Color Font features into Glyphr Studio. That would be a big release, bumping Glyphr Studio up to a v2.2.0 – we’ll see how it goes 🙂