Layers and components in the future

[Timo Klaavo]

Hi all!

The ufo3 spec states that "Components must only reference glyphs within the same layer that the component belongs to." I guess this choice was made with multiple masters and layered fonts in mind. I hope things will be more flexible in the future, so that any layer of any glyph could be referenced on any layer of any glyph, as long as circular references are avoided. Now layers in ufo3 are simply fonts within fonts with no shared components, and many tools don't follow only that kind of model.

Btw. There's a small error in the ufo spec. In countour indentifier description: "Unique identifier for the component." Should be "Unique identifier for the contour.", I suppose.

Thanks!

Timo

[Tal Leming]

Hi Timo,

> The ufo3 spec states that "Components must only reference glyphs within the same layer that the component belongs to." I guess this choice was made with multiple masters and layered fonts in mind. I hope things will be more flexible in the future, so that any layer of any glyph could be referenced on any layer of any glyph, as long as circular references are avoided.

This is something that I thought about but kicked the can down the road because there were so many other things to figure out. I have an idea now: add a baselayer attribute to the <component> element in GLIF. That would reference a layer name. We'd have to figure out backwards compatibility and all that.

> Btw. There's a small error in the ufo spec. In countour indentifier description: "Unique identifier for the component." Should be "Unique identifier for the contour.", I suppose.

Ah, yes.

Would you mind opening a couple of Github issues for these? I don't have time to work on them today, but I'd like to have a record of them.

Thanks,
Tal

[Timo Klaavo]

Thanks for the quick reply. Sounds good!
I opened new issues on GitHub for these.

Timo

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