Glyphr Studio - font editor

gaekwad · 2021-03-04 19:34:44

Glyphr Studio is a font editor.

www.glyphrstudio.com
www.glyphrstudio.com/online/
github.com/glyphr-studio/Glyphr-Studio-Desktop

I have some foundry fonts that always choke when I add them to macOS Font Book, and I’ve just accepted the “proceed with caution” warning without knowing what was amiss. Today I looked into font metadata editors, and this came up. It’s really good. The online version is virtually the same as the (Electron) desktop app in terms of speed, but may have a different feature set.

I remember colak had some experience of paring back fonts to the bare minimum – removing unused characters etc – to save bytes sent, so I figured someone would find it useful or interesting.

jakob · 2021-03-04 20:15:09

gaekwad wrote #329108:

Glyphr Studio is a font editor.

Nice one!

I remember colak had some experience of paring back fonts to the bare minimum – removing unused characters etc – to save bytes sent, so I figured someone would find it useful or interesting.

If you just need to subset your fonts for web use, these are also useful:

Google Webfonts helper helps you get tailored google fonts packages for self-hosting. Only for google fonts (as the name suggests) and it’s not as up to date as the actual site.
Fontsquirrel Web generator but as far as I remember, some fonts do not permit its use.
Glyphhanger command-line tool from Filament Group. It can be a bit of a hassle to install (requires Node and Python) and Sara Soueidan posted an article on getting Glyphhanger to work on MacOS using Homebrew just a couple of days ago. It’s nowhere near as comfortable as a UI tool but it is effective at turning TTF/OTFs into WOFF and WOFF2 format with subsetted character sets. Further articles on glyphhanger by A faster web and Zach Leatherman.

phiw13 · 2021-03-05 06:56:16

jakob wrote #329109:

If you just need to subset your fonts for web use, these are also useful:

[…] Glyphhanger command-line tool from Filament Group. It can be a bit of a hassle to install (requires Node and Python) and Sara Soueidan posted an article on getting Glyphhanger to work on MacOS using Homebrew just a couple of days ago. […]

Do you have any idea or experience how well that works with subsetting variable fonts? Inter-var is a lovely set, but at about 300kb it is not immediately ‘light weight’ (it has quite a wide coverage, much of which I don’t really need).

jakob · 2021-03-05 10:10:21

phiw13 wrote #329113:

Do you have any idea or experience how well that works with subsetting variable fonts? Inter-var is a lovely set, but at about 300kb it is not immediately ‘light weight’ (it has quite a wide coverage, much of which I don’t really need).

Sorry, no idea about the subsetting of variable fonts. I’ve only been casually watching the variable fonts front for now. I find the idea very intriguing, especially in fonts with stylistically different widths and weights but you also then need to know how to set them very precisely, e.g. exactly what weight you’re looking for. On retina displays you will see the subtle differences better than on regular displays.

Subsetting regular fonts is, however, quite effective. Here is a zip of the latin1 WOFF and WOFF2 fonts for the main weights. They max out at ~35kb for WOFF and ~27kb for WOFF2. Compare that with 135kb and 100kb in the download package from GitHub.

phiw13 · 2021-03-05 11:59:45

jakob wrote #329114:

Sorry, no idea about the subsetting of variable fonts. I’ve only been casually watching the variable fonts front for now. I find the idea very intriguing, especially in fonts with stylistically different widths and weights but you also then need to know how to set them very precisely, e.g. exactly what weight you’re looking for. On retina displays you will see the subtle differences better than on regular displays.

Oh, definitely, playing with those things on retina-type displays is a pleasure. on the lower end, cheapo low-res (PC) displays is difficult. But here is where variable fonts can be a boon:

:root { --base-font-weight: 400; --heading-1: calc(var(--base-font-weight) * 1.2) };  }
@media (min-resolution: 2dppx), (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { :root { --base-font-weight: 300; }  }

you get the drift, I guess.

note that high-resolution, “retina”-type displays are quickly becoming the majority here in E.Asia (that includes PC laptops & “office”-based devices.

Subsetting regular fonts is, however, quite effective.

Sure. No need to convince me here :-)

If the weather will be as depressing as promised over the WE, I’ll try to install Glyphhanger with Homebrew, I think I have most heavier dependencies (Python) already (thanks for the Sara Soueidan article BTW, I seem to have missed that in the feedreader).

Last edited by phiw13 (2021-03-05 13:01:05)

michaelkpate · 2021-03-05 13:52:27

gaekwad wrote #329108:

I remember colak had some experience of paring back fonts to the bare minimum – removing unused characters etc – to save bytes sent, so I figured someone would find it useful or interesting.

I’ve actually been taking some time to learn how to use Sigil to put together epub-formatted ebooks. One issue there is that if you want to do something fancy like Drop Caps with a custom font you have to include the file in the book. I had been thinking that the obvious solution was to only include the actual letters you needed and was planning to look more into that.

So this thread is perfect timing.

phiw13 · 2021-03-25 06:02:31

phiw13 wrote #329117:

[…] I’ll try to install Glyphhanger with Homebrew, I think I have most heavier dependencies (Python) already (thanks for the Sara Soueidan article BTW, I seem to have missed that in the feedreader).

Ok, It took me all a little longer but I have Glyphhanger installed now. For my use humble use case(s), it does the job just fine. I now use a set that supports Latin + Vietnamese characters and glyphs for about ~72KB each Roman and Italic – ⅓ for the original weight for the Variable font – and I can use the whole gamut from weight 100 to 900.

FWIW, the cloud-hosted version of Inter has subsetted sets available (through the CloudFlare CDN).
The subsetting is done with Glyphhanger as well. See the product page for the Inter font.

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#1 2021-03-04 19:34:44