Additional sorting view for the new glyphs view

[yanone]

I was pleasantly surprised that Fontra's new glyphs overview has a "Glyph name extension" grouping mechanism.

While this is a noticeable step forward in gathering an overview of character variations, here's an additional idea that I've been sharing with other font editor makers in the past that I absolutely need for my work with many alternatives per character, such as for Arabic. I made a PDF generator for myself that generates that overview, but it's cumbersome to use to the point where I am too lazy to use it actually.

A view where glyphs are arranged in a matrix, one row per character, with columns corresponding to glyph name extensions. This allows a quick-glance overview of

• which characters have which extensions, and therefore:
• which extensions are missing from a character (sometimes missing on purpose)
• whether base shapes are used correctly for all extensions (vertical comparison)
• whether accents are used correctly for all extensions (horizontal comparison)

Imagine a very calligraphic Arabic with up to 41 variants per character, and the same variants repeated for so many different characters that are supposed to share the same construction. The below view prohibits to extract any meaningful information about the glyph set.

The new "Glyph name extension" grouping allows to check whether all glyphs in that group share the correct base shape, but none of the other three pieces of information from the list above are possible to extract from this.

This means that the new view will have to scroll both vertically as well as horizontally (if extensions exceed available viewport). I see this implemented not as part of the existing "Group by" section, but as an output "view" independent of the groups, so that it can be combined with any glyph set.

Following expectations in UI, there would maybe be little icons just above the glyph view (or also in the left pane) that will take whatever glyph set is produced as a result of glyph set input (and hopefully filters in the future), and output it either as a normal list as of right now, or alternatively in the described matrix.

By carefully resizing my Glyphs window, I could reproduce what I mean for a small section of the glyphs (marked blue), but it goes out of sync left and right because, on purpose, not all character have all extensions. I want that matrix to always be in sync and produce gaps where glyphs are missing. Side idea: Offer automatic "add glyph" in that empty spot.

I also saw that thumbnails are expanding for very wide glyphs, which I find absolutely awesome! I think this should be kept in the matrix view and the column adapts to its widest glyph.