Quickstart — your first mask

New to layout tools entirely? This is the fastest way to end up with a real .gds file you can reopen in Glyph — or in KLayout, or any other GDSII tool. Every step below uses machinery you'll reach for constantly, so nothing here is throwaway.

Three things that make Glyph less scary than it looks:

• Everything is stored in nanometres, even though you'll normally type and read µm or mm — Edit → Settings picks the display unit, and Glyph converts for you under the hood. The numbers on disk are always nm-precise.
• Text and circles aren't "special." They flatten to ordinary polygons on export, so what you see is what a mask shop prints — a T label or a C circle is exactly as real as a hand-drawn boundary. (This is a common first fear coming from other tools — Glyph's text is never a font reference that silently vanishes.)
• An instance (SREF/AREF) is a live reference, not a copy. Placing the same cell twice and editing the cell once updates every placement — that's how step 6 below works, and it's the single most useful idea in GDS layout.

1. Draw a box. Press B for the Box tool, then click and drag on the canvas. You now have a filled rectangle on whichever layer is active (the one with the lit radio dot in the Layers panel).
2. Size it precisely. With the box still selected, look at the Properties panel on the right. Type an exact width and height into the W / H fields and press Enter — a typed value always wins over whatever you dragged. This is the panel you'll use for almost every precise edit in Glyph, not just this one.
3. Add a layer and give it a colour. Click the + at the top of the Layers panel to add a new layer, then click its colour chip to pick a colour and fill pattern. Click the new layer's radio dot to make it active — everything you draw next lands there. A "layer" in Glyph is just a numbered GDS layer with a colour you assign for your own sanity; the number is what actually matters to a mask shop.
4. Place an alignment cross from the component library. Open View → Component library, choose Standard cells from the dropdown, click the Alignment cross card, then click the canvas to drop it. This isn't hand-drawn geometry — it's a small cell with a single instance (SREF) placed at that point.
5. Add a text label. Press T, click where you want the label, then type your text into the Properties panel. It renders in Glyph's built-in stroke font by default and — per the reassurance above — exports as real polygons.
6. Array it. Find the alignment-cross cell you just placed in the Cells panel and click its Insert Array icon. Set rows/cols and a step size, then click the canvas to place the grid. Every mark in that grid is the same instance repeated (an AREF, not nine separate crosses) — edit the original cell later and the whole array updates together.
7. Measure the gap. Press M and drag between two features to read the distance live in the status bar and on the canvas. Press Enter right after the drag to pin it as a permanent labelled dimension instead of letting it disappear when you switch tools.
8. Save it. Press Ctrl+S. The first save opens a file picker; after that, Ctrl+S writes straight back to the same file. You now have a real .gds — open it again in Glyph, or hand it to any other GDSII tool.

That's the whole loop: draw, size, layer, instance, array, measure, save. Everything from here on is reference material for the same handful of ideas, described in more depth. §5 goes deeper on layers, §6–7 on cells and instances, §12 on text and fonts, §14 on measuring, and §15 on saving and export formats.