Glonce

Glyphs 4 ships with visual kerning and COLRv1 color fonts

toolsThe Glonce editorsHacker News🔥31Glonce rating31Impact35Novelty45Relevance30Surprise15Players20Credibility85

Glyphs, a font-editing application for Mac that describes itself as the leading Mac font editor, has released Glyphs 4, a major version built around a set of new drawing and workflow tools rather than a single headline feature. The most visible addition is visual kerning groups: designers can now drag and drop glyphs onto a shelf to build kerning groups, replacing manual list editing with a direct visual workflow. The app also gains full COLRv1 support, letting designers combine colored shapes with blending modes and opacities to produce smoother gradients, previewed live and exportable either as images or as COLRv1 color fonts. A new feature called pen points lets a designer drop points on any path segment to control width, height and angle, with the tool generating smooth transitions to the next node, aimed at variable-width stroke designs. The edit view has a new left sidebar for filtering glyph sets, stepping through shapes and inspecting interpolations without switching tabs, and a new master selector groups, filters and browses the masters of large font families in one place. Other additions include stroke caps for batch-editing monoline stroke miters and endings, a new Slanter filter that generates an oblique version of a font with adjustable slant, contrast and weight, a new head component type for building icons, an all-new scripting window for writing and managing custom Python code, a revamped live text preview window for testing fonts in context (alignment, tracking, leading and OpenType features), and star nodes, which let a designer shift-click a node to force a flawless curve-to-curve transition, including the squircle shape often used for app icons. Glyphs 4 exports all static and variable OpenType formats (CFF, CFF2, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2), plus PNG, SVG, PDF and SFSymbols images, and supports every major color font format: COLRv0/CPAL, COLRv1, SVG, sbix and traditional layered fonts. The product page does not state a price, an upgrade cost, a release date or system requirements, does not name the company or developer behind the app, and does not compare Glyphs 4 to the previous Glyphs 3 release.

Key facts

  • Visual kerning groups let designers build kerning sets by dragging glyphs onto a shelf instead of editing lists manually.
  • Glyphs 4 adds full COLRv1 support for combining colored shapes with blending modes and gradients, exportable as images or as color fonts.
  • A new pen points tool lets designers control stroke width, height and angle by dropping points directly on a path.
  • The app exports all static and variable OpenType formats (CFF, CFF2, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2) and every major color font format (COLRv0/CPAL, COLRv1, SVG, sbix, layered fonts).
  • No price, release date, developer name or comparison to the prior Glyphs 3 version appears on the product page.

Why it matters

Glyphs 4 is a major version of a font editor that calls itself the leading Mac tool for the job, and the update leans on workflow redesign rather than one flagship feature. Visual, drag and drop kerning groups and a full COLRv1 color font pipeline both remove steps that previously required manual list editing or export round trips, which matters for a niche but demanding audience: type and icon designers who spend hours in exactly these screens.

Who it affects

Type designers, icon and logo designers, and anyone producing variable or color OpenType fonts on a Mac. The new master browser and batch stroke-cap editing specifically target designers managing large, multi-master font families, while the head component type and star nodes are pitched at icon work rather than text typefaces.

How to use it

Glyphs 4 is presented on the app's own site, glyphsapp.com, as an upgrade for existing Glyphs users; the page does not state a price, an upgrade fee or a release date. It exports finished work as static and variable OpenType fonts (CFF, CFF2, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2), as images (PNG, SVG, PDF, SFSymbols), and in every major color font format, so the practical entry point is the export menu rather than any separate setup.

How solid is it

The only source here is the vendor's own product page, so every feature description and every line like navigating complex font families should not slow you down is marketing copy, not independent testing. The page does not name the company or developer behind Glyphs, and it makes no direct comparison to the previous Glyphs 3 release, so there is no way from this text alone to gauge how much has actually changed under the hood.

Risks and caveats

Treat the feature list as the vendor's own framing until reviewed independently: no third party is quoted, no user feedback is cited, and claims such as automated OpenType feature code that stays up to date by itself are unverified assertions from the page itself. Buyers upgrading from Glyphs 3 will need to look elsewhere for pricing, system requirements and a concrete list of what changed.

“Navigating complex font families should not slow you down.”

— Glyphs 4 product page