This repository contains curated glyphsets that Google Fonts hands out to designers of commissioned fonts for font authoring.
These glyphsets are not to be confused with the subsets that the Google Fonts API uses to minimize traffic by serving partial fonts based on subsets.
These subset definitions used to be hosted here in this repository but are now found over in the separate nam-files repository.
As a user of the Google Fonts API you may request a multi-script font to be served limited to a subset of glyphs, usually a certain script, such as https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto+Mono&subset=cyrillic, to speed up file transfer by leaving out unnecessary glyphs.
Glyphsets on the other hand are what Google Fonts requires font authors to put into fonts when designing them, and they’re not identical to subsets. You can get a font’s complete glyphset by manually downloading a TTF on fonts.google.com, but you typically don’t get the same glyphs in a font accessed through the Google Fonts API because these are subsetted.
If you are a font author and you want to merely get your hands on ready-made glyphsets, pick your files straight out of the /data/results folder, such as .glyphs files with empty placeholder glyphs, or .plist files that are so-called Custom Filters that will show up in the Glyphs.app sidebar when placed alongside your source files. Alternatively, you can cook your own Custom Filters with the glyphsets tool, see the Glyphsets Tool section at the bottom of this document.
The rest of this README is addressing people who are editing glyphset and language definitions.
The repository recently (end of 2023/start of 2024) underwent a bigger overhaul in how the glyphsets are assembled.
The current approach has become part of a bigger network of tools that is also comprised of gflanguages and shaperglot, as well as fontbakery’s shape_languages check.
In the ideal scenario, glyphsets are defined merely by lists of language codes (such as tu_Latn).
During the build process (sh build.sh), the gflanguages database will be queried for all characters defined for those languages, then combined into a single glyphset.
Optionally, encoded characters as well as unencoded glyphs may be defined in glyphset-specific or language-specific files here in gfglyphsets, whose contents will also be added to the final glyphsets.
Later during font QA (as part of font onboarding work, just FYI), Fontbakery's shape_languages check first determines which glyphsets a font supports, then uses the languages defined for each glyphset to invoke shaperglot, which checks whether each language shapes correctly or not.
This presents quite a leap forward in font QA where shaperglot invokes the harfbuzz shaping engine to prove the entire OpenType-stack to be funtioning at once, including mark attachment and character sequences.
shaperglot contains its own sets of script- or language-specific definitions, such as a check to see whether the ı and i shape into distinct letters in small-caps for Turkish.
Note
See GLYPHSETS.md for an up-to-date description of the state of the new glyphset definitions. Many glyphsets have not been transitioned to the new approach and still exist as manually curated lists of characters and unencoded glyphs.
In order for the build command to correctly assemble glyphsets using language defintions, make sure that your work environment sports the latest version of gflanguages. If unsure, update it with pip install -U gflanguages.
Oftentimes you may want to adjust language definitions in gflanguages at the same time as you’re adjusting other parts of the glyphsets. In this case you may clone the gflanguages repository to your computer and install it using pip install -e . from within its root folder. This will expose your gflanguages clone to your entire system (or virtual environment) and changes in gflanguages will automatically be reflected in other tools that use it, such as gfglyphsets, without the need of re-installing it after every code or data change. Thus, running sh build.sh will automatically use your latest language definitions, even before you have PR’d your language definition changes back to the repository.
Inside this repository, data is defined in two different places.
One place is inside the glyphsets Python package (/Lib/glyphsets/definitions). This data that needs to be exposed to third-party tools such as fontbakery.
The other place is in /data/definitions. This data is only used for authoring glyphsets and need not be distributed as part of the Python package.
-
Inside Python package: Glyphsets are defined in
.yamlfiles inside the Python package folder at/Lib/glyphsets/definitions. -
Outside of Python package: Additional files in the
/data/definitionssub-folders will become part of the glyphsets as soon as they are found to exist under a certain filename. If a file that you need doesn't exist there, create it in its place.
In order to determine where characters (encoded with a Unicode) or glyphs (unencoded) are defined, follow this logic:
- Is it a language-specific encoded character? Then it goes into the
gflanguagesdatabase (which is a separate package) for example here.gflanguagesholds only encoded characters, not unencoded glyphs. Prepare a separate PR forgflanguagesif you are changing those definitions as well. - Is it a language-specific unencoded glyph? Then it goes into
/data/definitions/per_language - Is it a more general glyphset-specific character or glyph? Then it goes into
/data/definitions/per_glyphset
If you find that you need additional separate definitions per script, contact @yanone to implement it.
Once your language and glyphset definitions are set up and edited, run sh build.sh from the command line. This command sources characters from gflanguages as well as characters and glyphs from the various files in the /data/definitions folder, and combines them into one comprehensive list per glyphset, which are then rendered out into various different data formats into the /data/results folder.
Additionally, the GLYPHSETS.md document is updated, which contains a human-readable overview of the state of each glyphset.
Note
When making PRs, the glyphsets will automatically be rendered depending on defintion changes (which is useful for dependency update PRs such as glyphsLib or gflanguages). This means that you don’t need to supply updated glyphsets and GLYPHSETS.md as part of your PR (as rendered by sh build.sh). A PR may be as simple as adding a language to a .yaml defintion and the changes to glyphsets will automatically be added in a commit to your PR where you can review the changed glyphsets.
Here’s a visual overview of the data definitions that go into each glyphset, and the files that are created as results.
Read this top to bottom.
DEFINITIONS:
┌──────────────────┐
│ Language codes │
│ "en_Latn" │
│ "de_Latn" │
│ ... │
└──────────────────┘
│
┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ gflanguages │ │ .stub.glyphs │
│ (Python package) │ │ (optional) │
└──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘
│ │
╰──────────────────────┬──────────────────────╯
│
BUILD PROCESS: │
│
╔═══════════════════════════════╗
║ complete glyphset ║
╚═══════════════════════════════╝
│
RESULTS: │
│
╭──────────────────────┼──────────────────────┬──────────────────────╮
│ │ │ │
┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐
│ .txt │ │ .nam │ │ .glyphs │ │ .plist │
│ (nice & prod) │ │ │ │ │ │ │
└──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘
Note
Previously existing commands of the glyphsets tool are currently deactivated after the transition to the new database. These are: update-srcs, nam-file, missing-in-font. Please report if you need to use these.
You can create your own Glyphs.app Custom Filters using the glyphsets tool.
Install or update the tool with pip, if you haven’t already:
pip install -U glyphsets
Create a filter list for Glyph.app:
glyphsets filter-list -o myfilter.plist GF_Latin_Core GF_Latin_Plus
Add this .plist file next to your Glyphs file and (after restart) you would be able to see it in the filters sidebar.
You can compare the contents of two or more glyphsets against each other. Each consecutive glyphset will be compared to the previous one.
This command lists the complete contents of GF_Latin_Kernel first, and then lists only extra (or missing) glyphs for GF_Latin_Core when compared to GF_Latin_Kernel:
glyphsets compare GF_Latin_Kernel GF_Latin_Core
Output:
GF_Latin_Kernel:
===============
Total glyphs: 116
Letter (52 glyphs):
`A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z`
...
GF_Latin_Core:
=============
Total glyphs: 324
GF_Latin_Core has 208 **extra** glyphs compared to GF_Latin_Kernel:
Letter (168 glyphs):
`ª º À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ø ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ Ā ā Ă ă Ą ą Ć ć Ċ ċ Č č Ď ď Đ đ Ē ē Ė ė Ę ę Ě ě Ğ ğ Ġ ġ Ģ ģ Ħ ħ Ī ī Į į İ ı Ķ ķ Ĺ ĺ Ļ ļ Ľ ľ Ł ł Ń ń Ņ ņ Ň ň Ő ő Œ œ Ŕ ŕ Ř ř Ś ś Ş ş Š š Ť ť Ū ū Ů ů Ű ű Ų ų Ŵ ŵ Ŷ ŷ Ÿ Ź ź Ż ż Ž ž Ș ș Ț ț ȷ Ẁ ẁ Ẃ ẃ Ẅ ẅ ẞ Ỳ ỳ /idotaccent`
...
To help authoring glyphsets, use glyphsets find ſ or glyphsets find 0x017F to see in which language definions (and under which category therein) and glyphsets a character is defined. As usual, the definitions are pulled from the glyphsets and gflanguages modules that are currently installed on your machine or venv
glyphsets % glyphsets find ß
Character: [ß] (0x00DF LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S)
Language Name Category Speakers Script Regions
---------- ------------- ---------- ---------- -------- ---------------------------------------
fr_Latn French auxiliary 272965534 Latn Asia, Americas, Oceania, Europe, Africa
de_Latn German base 134799567 Latn Asia, Americas, Europe, Africa
tr_Latn Turkish auxiliary 80191488 Latn Europe, Asia
it_Latn Italian auxiliary 70743415 Latn Oceania, Europe, Americas
pl_Latn Polish auxiliary 38273562 Latn Europe, Asia
nds_Latn Low German base 11520008 Latn Europe
fi_Latn Finnish auxiliary 5736841 Latn Europe
lb_Latn Luxembourgish auxiliary 421015 Latn Europe
ksh_Latn Colognian base 240479 Latn Europe
hsb_Latn Upper Sorbian auxiliary 12825 Latn Europe
wae_Latn Walser auxiliary 11376 Latn Europe
dsb_Latn Lower Sorbian auxiliary 6973 Latn Europe
Character is part of the following glyphsets:
---------------------------------------------
GF_Latin_Core
GF Greek Glyph Sets defined by Irene Vlachou @irenevl and Thomas Linard @thlinard. Documented by Alexei Vanyashin @alexeiva January 2017.
GF Glyph Sets defined by Alexei Vanyashin (@alexeiva) and Kalapi Gajjar (@kalapi) from 2016-06-27 to 2016-10-11, with input from Dave Crossland, Denis Jacquerye, Frank Grießhammer, Georg Seifert, Gunnar Vilhjálmsson, Jacques Le Bailly, Michael Everson, Nhung Nguyen (Vietnamese lists), Pablo Impallari (Impallari Encoding), Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (@mekkablue), Thomas Jockin, Thomas Phinney (Adobe Cyrillic lists), and Underware (Latin Plus Encoding)
Since v1.0.0, use these rules for version updates in line with semver:
- Major versions for API changes (v1.0.0)
- Minor versions for language data changes (v1.1.0)
- Patch version for non-breaking miniscule code or language data fixes (v1.1.1)