I'm finding Pendot Designer to be suddenly unstable. It was working with no trouble for about an hour today. Then the script crashed when I was trying to switch the view in a tab to the Pendot Preview layer. I get this:

• Open PendotLSource
• Switch to tab containing full A-z and a-z
• Run Pendot Designer and switch to Dot Regular instance
• (the E glyph should be currently selected)
• Choose text tool
• Choose Pendot Preview layer
• command-A to select all, and crash

This was the same type of bug reported on 20 May, which you then seemed to fix, as it hasn't happened since until now.

I initially suspected that some of my messing around with layers was the cause, but I get the exact same result if I roll back to the PendotL from 20 June.

The dots produced by the build are more square than those produced by the Glyphs plugin, identical parameters:

Currently Guidelines are being defined by name, font-wide values in the master. The Thickness is then extended upwards, starting at the named value. But since strokes (and dots) are expanded in both directions, this results in guidelines and strokes that are mismatched, as in:

There are a few different ways this could be addressed:

• Center Guidelines: Center them on the named height values rather than extend them vertically. This will at least center-align everything consistently. It does mean that thick strokes over thin guidelines will extend on both sides of the guideline, which is not ideal.
• Define many more custom font-wide heights: We would add names heights like “BaselineXL”, “BaselineL”. “BaselineR”, etc. then use these. We could also center the guidelines on the height value (preferred by me), or just leave the behaviour as is and let the designer tweak it.
• Switch to using instance-specific height values: This would allow us to tweak the guidelines to be in ideal positions, even when the thickness is different from the strokes/dots. We could also center the guidelines on the height value (preferred by me), or just leave the behaviour as is and let the designer tweak it.
• Add an alignment adjustment option (preferred): This would involve adding a alignment preference option to each guideline in each instance. When setting a guideline you would choose the font-wide named value, the thickness, and an alignment chosen from these 7 options:
  -- Center (default)
  -- Top (top of guideline is at chosen value)
  -- Top of stroke (top of guideline is at chosen value + half of stroke width)
  -- Top of dot (top of guideline is at chosen value + half of dot width)
  -- Bottom (bottom of guideline is at chosen value, this is the current default)
  -- Bottom of stroke (bottom of guideline is at chosen value - half of stroke width)
  -- Bottom of dot (bottom of guideline is at chosen value - half of dot width)
• Adjust the stroking/dotting algorithm to force the letters into height-limited boxes: This would be a major change in strategy, and require quite a bit of revision to the algorithms. When I looked at this long ago, our current strategy of expanding strokes in all directions won out, and I still agree, so I’d not want us to pursue this.

I’d prefer the alignment adjustment option. I’d be willing to go with switching to using instance-specific values or defining many more custom font-wide height values. In any case I’d prefer that the default be to use the value to define the center, not the bottom, of the guideline.

If you have been working on the font with Pendot Designer active, then close the font (so no font is open), then click on the close circle of the designer, you get a python error:

Enable the designer to set (in instance custom parameters) a named layer as a source for alternate skeleton sources. If a glyph exists in that layer then the dotter would use that glyph as the source rather than the normal one.

This would allow for instance-specific alterations to the skeletal source that would change the dotted results, much like delta hints. These would then have no impact on other instances or on other operations such as stroking.

Normal dot collision avoidance does not work between two glyphs. However, connected scripts, such as Arabic, will end up with dots on top of one another by default if the skeletal strokes are designed to connect. It would be better to find a way to avoid overlapped dots. Even for scripts that do not have formal OpenType cursive connections it might be useful to somehow control this.

We could add metadata to a node (similar to forced dots) that would drop any dot at that location if a custom parameter is set. This would work for glyphs that are known to be non-final.

There may be better solutions.

It seems that overlap removal is not working in the build, even if "preventOverlaps = 1" is in the fontinfo.plist config data.

Recent changes are resulting in some odd dotting patterns:

This is using font-pendot-latin with the following settings:

userData = {
co.uk.corvelsoftware.Dotter = {
dotSize = 60;
dotSpacing = 40;
preventOverlaps = 1;
splitPaths = 1;
};

One of the most problematic situations for dotting is at sharp corners with tight angles. It's not clear how to improve these by manipulating the outline:

(font-pendot-latin size/spacing 60/40 with prevent overlap and split paths)

These examples are much better than some others, and have forced dots at all sharp corners of AVW. This helps with aligning dots to the baseline or cap height (but the top of A is still too low), but often there is a gap after the forced dot. It seems like the segment(s) connecting to sharp corners need some realignment to fill in the gap.

In Glyphs 3.3 (3307) using Python 3.11.9 (Glyphs), and the latest Dotter (d3c2445) I get the following traceback in the Macro Panel output: (No Pendot Designer dialog box shows)

Dot Size 15
Dot Spacing 15
Prevent Overlaps True
Split Paths False
Contour Source <Default>
Stroker Width 50
Stroker Height 50
Stroker Angle 0
Start Cap round
End Cap round
Join Type round
Remove External False
Remove Internal False
Segment Wise False
Dot Size 30
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "Pendot Designer.py", line 599
    setattr(GSApplication, "_pendotdesigner", PendotDesigner())
                                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "Pendot Designer.py", line 346, in __init__
    self.on_layer_change()
  File "Pendot Designer.py", line 516, in on_layer_change
    self.reload_values()
  File "Pendot Designer.py", line 528, in reload_values
    self.reload_guidelines()
  File "Pendot Designer.py", line 473, in reload_guidelines
    [
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable

Add stroking preview to the Pendot Designer tool, with similar UI and workflow as dotting.

The addition of stoking to Designer causes it to crash, which looks like a problem on Intel architectures.

Our team is half Intel machines and half Apple Silicon so needs to run on both.

This is a possible future enhancement.

Metadata could be added to a node that says "taper near here" so that the size of dots are gradually reduced as the skeleton approaches or leaves the node. This would be very helpful for joins and other places where contours meet. Ideally the designer would be able to set the amount and 'speed' of reduction (linear, etc.).

Dot patterns are being shifted down. both in the plugin and build, in this case by 15 units, so that they no longer center on the baseline.

The 'Pendot Quick Preview' layer is a remnant from an old version of Dotter, however editing in Glyphs with the Pendot Designer script active sometimes adds this layer back into the primary master. This occurs even after the layer has been completely removed from all glyphs with a script and the layer confirmed to be eliminated from the .glyphspackage file.

Steps to reproduce:

• open PendotLSource, go to tab with abcdefgh... and 'e' in focus
• run Pendot Designer
• click on Regular in the list of Layers in the Glyphs right side panel
• the windows changes to show the skeleton, but the Pendot Quick Preview layer suddenly appears again

Add dots as a component reference to a single dot component rather than a drawn circle.

With the latest changes the filter crashes on Glyphs startup and no longer activates, and generates the following error the next time Glyphs starts up:

If I try to run a project that has "splitPaths = 1" in the config data in fontinfo.plist the build process hangs on the first exec step. If I set it to "0" it works fine.

One per instance, using settings in the instance custom parameters

The Override mechanism seems to not be working at all for parameters. Examples:

• open PendotL, choose tab with abcdef... and select f
• run Pendot Designer
• choose Dot Light instance
• click Override glyph /f? next to Flex Percent and type 100

• Create Preview Master

Nothing changes (even though changing the non-override to 100 results in a change to f - the crossbar is dotted better).

Trying to change other parameters such as Dot Size doesn't work either.

Clicking on Override for a Contour Source causes an error:

(for procedure see other Override failure issue)