Phinney on Fonts

Ordering the Glyph Panel

Written by

Thomas Phinney

in

I seem to be getting addicted to surveys! Now that I’ve reported the results of the last one, I have some quick UI questions about apps and OSes here.

In Adobe InDesign, there’s a Glyph Panel that allows you to view all the glyphs in a font, and insert ay glyph into your text. Prior to InDesign CS3, the glyphs were displayed in the same physical order they happen to be stored in the font (GID/​CID order). In InDesign CS3 and later, the default is to display them in Unicode order, though one can optionally change to Unicode order. Either way, one can also filter to display only specific Unicode ranges such as Latin Extended B or Cyrillic.

Operating systems and font management applications sometimes have similar functionality. I’m doing a brief survey about what you’d like to see.

Thanks! I’ll be happy to report the survey results when I’m done, as usual.

Comments

2 responses to “Ordering the Glyph Panel”

  1. Jackson

    Excellent survey idea, following up on the thread on typophile. I think you should add something to briefly explain what sorting by GID/​CID order means so I can link this to designer friends who aren’t literate in the technical terms.

    [Yes, good point, I’ll go do that. Thanks! – T]

  2. Chris Lozos

    I prefer the GID order to the unicode order for users. I think that it makes glyphs easier to find. Of course, I was one of the squeaky wheels who questioned it anyway 🙂

    Chris

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