fontParts 101

[roberto-arista]

Dear all, during Robothon I approached @benkiel willing to help a little bit with tests. But, as @typemytype told me yesterday at typolabs, they are almost ready. I was not quick enough ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Also, I tried to dive a little bit into the tests, but with my degree of experience with them (and OOP), I do not think I could be very helpful at this stage.

But, I still want to contribute. My proposal is to compile a FontParts 101 cookbook. During the years, especially while I was doing my first steps with Python, I found the Python Cookbook by David Beazley very useful. I would have definitely used also a Robofab cookbook, so maybe now is the time to make one for fontParts.

What do you think about this? Should I move forward?

In case, I would move as follow:

• publish a first list of snippets organised per category just to start a discussion concerning what should be in or not
• draw some attention (via twitter I assume) from the type community, asking for contributions and ideas on this thread
• take care of adding and polishing any proposal into actual documentation

ps @typemytype told me “hey, snippets are cool, but they have to work”. So, they should be tested similarly to what happens with Drawbot docs snippets. Any help with setting this, would be nice. I am a fast learner! : )

[typesupply]

This is a great idea! (It might be good to replace #217 with this.)

[andyclymer]

Nice! I'd love to contribute.

[benkiel]

Agree, this is a great idea (even if @typemytype is a bit optimistic about the tests, there is still plenty to do!), let's do it.

Your plan makes sense, I'd start building it out in the documentation under the https://github.com/robofab-developers/fontParts/tree/master/documentation/source/gettingstarted section.

I do think there are things you can pull from the older RoboFab documentation, and it is worth talking with @campbellgraphics about this, as he volunteered to help port the documentation, but I don't know the current state of that.

All that said, yes, do it! (and thank you!)

[campbellgraphics]

cool idea. I'm further behind than I'd thought, so I don't have any new/updated documentation built yet. I'll add or contribute wherever makes sense

[roberto-arista]

👌

[gferreira]

see also: Simple scripts

[roberto-arista]

It took some time, but finally I managed to compile the following list of routines:

Bookkeeping

• sort glyphs by
  • unicode value
  • glyph name
  • according to an external glyphlist
• change suffix to glyphs
• swap glyphs (from .ss01 to .ss02 and viceversa)
• store data into font.lib and glyph.lib
• transfer and scale kerning
• convert unicode hex to int (from uniName to glyph.unicode)
• convert unicode int to hex (from glyph.unicode to uniName or similar)

Transform a glyph

• decompose all components in a glyph
• clean anchors (or filter them by name)
• properly slant a glyph (contours and components)
• create a global mask on a selection of glyphs
• create a local mask on a selection of glyphs

Automatic building of glyphs

• place anchors over a glyph according to font italic angle
• build accented letters using anchors
• scale and interpolate for small caps (or dnoms)

Working with contours

• draw
  • a rect
  • a oval
  • a regular polygon
  • a non-regular polygon starting from a list of coordinates
• delete a contour from a glyph
• attach a label to a point
• get points with a specific label
• get a point unique ID

Testing

• print negative sidebearings
• spot (and delete) loner points
• check if a group of glyphs is monospaced (tabular digits)
• test margins against a reference (fe D vs Dcroat)
• compare two fonts glyphlists
• spot duplicate contours

Transfer data across fonts (and adjust it if needed)

• font.info
• kerning
• groups
• glyphs (contours, components, anchors) and attributes

What do you think? Anything else you would like to see in that list? Did I miss any big category of problems? Some routines are similarly covered in the simple scripts section of the robofont documentation previously posted by @gferreira. Should we avoid duplication?

[benkiel]

I would take what makes sense from the RoboFont documentation, but cast it in a FontParts only way: it's ok if there is duplication, FontParts isn't RoboFont, and will hopefully live as a common scripting layer the way RoboFab became.