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mozilla / Fira

Mozilla's new typeface, used in Firefox OS
mozilla.github.io/Fira
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Toolset to build Fira from sources #62

Closed tonsky closed 9 years ago

tonsky commented 10 years ago

Hi!

I wanted to add couple of ligatures to Fira Mono similar to what Hasklig does to Source Code Pro, for personal use.

I’m trying to build Fira Mono from sources but am completely lost. Can you describe what tools I need and short step-by-step explanation what to run in which order?

I’ve tried:

I’m a total newbie with modern font editing and I just want to add couple of glyphs and ligature feature. Can you help me with this? (preferably without buying Glyphs.app which is kinda expensive for 1-time personal usage)

Thanks! (great font btw, use it everyday for code editing & in terminal)

tonsky commented 10 years ago

I managed to decompile otf file with RoboFont and build custom version with programming ligatures, here: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

I guess this is not the best workflow possible and I possibly lost some information in that process. So I’m still interested in a answer.

Meanwhile, how do you feel about including such ligatures into main branch of Fira Mono, maybe as an optional feature?

patrykdesign commented 9 years ago

Sorry for the late reply, those ligatures look cool, we should have a minor update of fira mono (3.2) soon, so once that is in, lets add your ligatures and see how they work.

I know we use glyphs to build the font, so I am not sure any other way to build the UFO file sorry :(

tonsky commented 9 years ago

@patrykdesign cool, thanks!

Confirming: I was able to open .ufo sources in Glyphs, add new glyph, add liga feature and export it to otf, all went very smoothly.

davelab6 commented 9 years ago

The UFO sources are nice for interchange, but they aren't the actual sources used by the upstream designers - they use Glyphs and thus the .glyphs files are the real source format :) I've opened https://github.com/mozilla/Fira/issues/75 to request them.

tonsky commented 9 years ago

I also noticed that Clone → Open UFO in Glyphs → Export OTF... generates slightly different version of the font than is published in otf folder:

screen shot 2015-03-12 at 17 25 57

(downloaded Fira Mono on the left, exported from UFO on the right)

I agree that .glyphs source would be very helpful

patrykdesign commented 9 years ago

Apparently we're using a "beta" version of glyphs 2 right now, so the glyph file is not going to work in V1 of the app. But as soon as that standardizes, we'll upload a glyphs version of the source as well... might be a few weeks tho.

davelab6 commented 9 years ago

I'm curious why you are waiting. The Glyphs 2 beta is publicly available to anyone with a license to Glyphs, and many other libre fonts have glyphs v2 files published on Github.

patrykdesign commented 9 years ago

According to Ralph Glyphs 1 or older versions of Glyphs 2 BETA will completely mess up the files if opened and saved. His team is currently working on adding extended Greek and Cyrillic, so once those are done, I would ideally want to release the glyph files as well.

patrykdesign commented 9 years ago

Closing since I added source glyphs files to the repo.