Self Extensibility

[davelab6]

I would love to see glyphr become self extensible; so that as a user, you can extend it, as you use it. I can see a first step being a simple tutorial video showing how to do this with the Dev Tools of Firefox or Chrome or MSIE etc, but I think ideally this would be fully within the web interface.

www.Prose.io uses github as a file store, and there are now many libre licensed web based IDEs that could even be integrated!

My dream for it being self extensible is that I as a user can design and develop a new feature directly in Glyphr. It would be amazing to have a user-developer community established like RoboFont and Glyphrs have around their Python API.

API-wise, RoboFont is a good self extensible model to follow. I think the UFO is not so good as designers make families, not fonts, so the glyphs file format would be better as a model.

[mattlag]

I like this idea, but I think it's straying a little from my original vision of Glyphr Studio being an accessible / easy to use toolset targeted at beginners or hobbyists. I know there are lots of great tools out there for more advanced users. And i'm not opposed to Glyphr Studio growing into some more "pro" features... but in terms of work prioritization this seems like it may be a little farther down the road.

[davelab6]

Maybe the web stack is so widely known to designers or at least their studio partners that a repl style editor is the js console itself and just having a clean internal api and a link to firebug and devtools documentation is sufficient to meet this need :)

[davelab6]

I think a key part of this is implementing the "pen" API in the Glyphr API. This powerful object pattern could help with #25

• http://robofab.com/howto/usepens.html
• http://www.robofab.org/objects/pen.html
• https://github.com/behdad/fonttools/blob/master/Lib/fontTools/pens/basePen.py
• https://github.com/behdad/fonttools/blob/master/Lib/fontTools/pens/boundsPen.py
• https://github.com/behdad/fonttools/blob/master/Lib/fontTools/pens/transformPen.py

[mattlag]

Cool - i'll look into this, thanks!

[graphicore]

The pen API is completely implemented in ufoJS: https://github.com/graphicore/ufoJS/tree/master/lib/tools/pens

These are JS ports from Robofab and Fonttools. I did not yet port all pens from there, though. If you have questions about this, please ask!

[davelab6]

I'm obviously keen for glyphr to use ufoJS :)

[graphicore]

Well, if glyphr uses the pen-API it's a good start to use ufoJS, too. Also, we could all use the same pens to write outline data to opentype.js

[davelab6]

Right, @felipesanches is working on that right now

[felipesanches]

cool! :-)