Consider switching source format from SFDIR to UFO

[marnen]

There is a dilemma in terms of open font formats. SFDIR, though technically open, is only understood (AFAIK) by FontForge, but FontForge is OSS and widely available. The open UFO format, OTOH, is understood by lots of font editors—but none of them seem to be OSS, with the exception of TruFont, which doesn't work that well yet (at least on Mac OS). What to do?

[davelab6]

FontForge has (some) UFO support, in and out, and I would recommend this switch to UFO because https://github.com/googlei18n/fontmake is going to be the best way to set up your font on github with travis :)

[marnen]

@davelab6 Thanks, I didn't know about Fontmake.

I know FontForge will edit UFO files, but as long as I'm using it as my primary editor, I'd kind of rather use its native format for the source. How well does it export SFDir to UFO? (I'll test, but figured I'd ask first.)

[marnen]

FWIW, although I'm building the font kind of manually at the moment, I had planned to set up a Makefile or Rake task to run FontForge from the command line. I'm not sure why I need Travis for a font...

[marnen]

I'm going to try converting to UFO, but I think #9 should happen first.

[marnen]

Tabling this for now. I like the UFO format, but the workflow with open-source tools is not there yet. FontForge can't intelligently round-trip a UFO font with OpenType features, while TruFont has poor drawing tools, and Inkscape doesn't understand GLIF files.

@davelab6 I'd be happy to be wrong about this. What's your workflow like with TruFont?

[marnen]

Just tried TruFont 0.4.0. It's better, but there are still too many rough edges and missing features, and no other suitable tool seems to exist for UFO/GLIF editing yet.

[davelab6]

You were not wrong! :) The space is slowly evolving in a chaotic mannger, sadly. Metapolator and Prototypo and Glyphr Studio also worth a look for the web platform side of things

[davelab6]

I used FontForge around 2005 - 2009 and then I worked in libre font organization

[marnen]

@davelab6 Thanks for the recommendations. I didn't think Metapolator was ready for actual use yet, but I'll check out those other ones.

However, the needs of this project seem to be somewhat different from what seem to be the "low-hanging fruit" usually implemented in "hobbyist" font editors...