Glyph documentation

The Glyph user manual, split into per-topic pages. Glyph is a free, browser-based GDSII mask editor.

Get started

Quickstart — your first mask — Draw, size, layer, instance, array, measure, and save your first GDSII mask in Glyph's browser-based editor.
The workspace — A tour of the Glyph editor layout: menu bar, tab strip, toolbar, layers and cells panels, canvas, and status bar.
Tools (toolbar, single-letter shortcuts) — The drawing tools (box, polygon, path, circle, arc, text, measure), their single-letter shortcuts, and the command palette.
View navigation — Pan, zoom, zoom-to-fit, viewport history, bookmarks, CSV review markers, and go-to-coordinate in the Glyph canvas.

Editing — Selection, copy/paste, nudging, the authoritative Properties panel, vertex and edge editing, and construction geometry.
Modify — closed-shape editing tools — The AutoCAD-style Stretch, Match Properties, and Slice tools that edit closed polygons without breaking GDS export.
Drawing modifiers — ortho, polar tracking, dynamic input — Ortho mode, polar tracking, the dynamic-input HUD, and the AutoCAD-style coordinate grammar for precise drawing.
Measuring — Measure distances and angles on the canvas and pin them as persistent, export-excluded dimension annotations.

Layers — How Glyph's numbered GDS layers work: colour, fill pattern, mask field tone, visibility, lock, opacity, and z-order.
Cells and hierarchy — Organise geometry with GDS cells: add, enter, rename, delete, group, and flatten, with safe-rename and cascade-delete guarantees.
Instances: SREF and AREF — Place single (SREF) and arrayed (AREF) cell instances, and use the parametric component library with connect-ports routing.
Arrange — alignment, distribution, transform, boolean — Align, distribute, move, rotate, scale, and offset shapes, plus array, identifier labels, and search-and-replace of cell references.
Boolean operations and layer merge — Union, difference, intersect, and XOR selected shapes, and merge every shape on the active layer into one polygon.

Design-rule check (DRC) — Run min-width, min-spacing, and min-area checks with hierarchy flattening; step through violation markers on the canvas.
Bitmap import & Trace — Import a raster image as a tracing reference and convert it to real polygons with cutoff, steps, edges, or colours modes.
Fonts — built-in and imported — Use the built-in glyph-stroke font, common OFL faces, or imported TTF/OTF fonts, and flatten text to boundary polygons.
File I/O — Open, save, and export GDSII, SVG, PNG, and per-layer masks, import DXF and foundry layer maps, and use autosave recovery.

Tabs — multiple open documents — Work on several GDS documents at once in independent tabs with a shared clipboard for copy-paste between them.
Settings (Edit → Settings…) — Configure display units, default path width and text size, grid density, hierarchy depth, and arc/circle tessellation.
Connecting Claude (optional) — Drive Glyph from an external Claude client over a local MCP bridge so an AI agent can draw, place, and read geometry.
BEAM link (optional) — Send designs to and from a BeamXplorer maskless-lithography machine on the same computer: connect, load, slice, and edit without touching the filesystem.

Troubleshooting — Fixes for common Glyph issues: cyclic references, nothing drawing, missing shapes on export, and the Claude bridge.
Keyboard reference — The complete keyboard-shortcut reference for Glyph, grouped by tools, draw, edit, arrange, view, verify, and file.