New FontLab VI Public Preview for Mac
A new FontLab VI Public Preview for Mac is out, adding context menus, a Gallery panel for named shapes, faster glyph access, and italic-angle drawing.
This build lands a month after the last preview, with new features and a long list of fixes. The highlights:
Interface
- Context menus (right-click or Ctrl+click) now work in the Glyph and Font windows.
- A High contrast mode in Preferences › Editing boosts the visual contrast of UI elements in the Glyph window.
Shapes
- The new Gallery panel lists every named shape in the font and lets you drop it into the active layer via the Place button or drag-and-drop, in either the Glyph or Font window. Name a shape in the Shapes panel and it joins the Gallery for reuse elsewhere.
Glyph access
Keyboard navigation in the Font and Glyph windows is faster:
/jumps to a glyph by name;#jumps by Unicode.- Cmd+F (Edit › Find Glyphs…) inserts or selects glyphs by various criteria.
- Shift+Cmd+F jumps to the Search box to filter the Font window or insert results in the Glyph window.
- Cmd+L (Edit › List Related Glyphs…) goes to glyphs related to the current selection.
The Font window’s All Glyphs toggle controls filtering: on (default) shows filtered cells in a “yellow area” at the top with the rest following, FontLab Studio 5 style; off hides everything but the matches.
Glyph design
- View › Apply Italic Angle (the
\key) cycles through three states for italic fonts: slanted sidebearings, slanted sidebearings plus a slanted grid (so Shift-constrained moves follow the italic axis), and straightened. - Arrow keys move points by 1 unit; with Ctrl 0.1 unit, with Shift 10 units, with Cmd 100 units. The base and Shift distances are configurable in Preferences › Distances.
- With the Guides tool, Ctrl+click adds a glyph anchor and Alt+click adds a shape pin.
- Glyphs made with Generate Glyphs now respect matching named anchors such as
top/_top.
Import, export, technology
- A confirmation dialog now shows where exported fonts were written.
- Curve Conversion › Create short curves now applies only to explicit, user-initiated conversion. A new Open Fonts › Break long TrueType curves to short segments setting governs the same behavior when fonts are opened.
- The built-in ttfautohint and HarfBuzz are updated to their April 2016 versions.
Beyond these, the build clears a long list of fixes across the Font and Glyph windows, the Sketchboard, the Layers and Shapes panels, and various crashes, plus assorted refresh and redraw problems.
A Windows version is also in progress.
Current builds run on OS X 10.7 and later. They do not run on 10.6.8 or earlier.