[Openfontlibrary] Font File Type and Admins?

[Jon Phillips]

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 06:27 -0800, George Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 10:45, Dave Crossland wrote:
> > I'm also wondering about UFO.
> > 
> > The UFO format from the TTX [1] project seems promising. Like most
> > forms of XML, its an interchange format for source code, not
> > functional code. A UFO is like a Mac OS X 'bundle', a folder with XML
> > files inside, that can be treated as one file. Each XML file inside
> > describes each glyph, and this eases collaborative working with
> > CVS/SVN/etc as you can get a simple changelog of each glyph. Being
> > XML, you can use whatever XML tools you are familiar with, like say
> > python.
> > 
> > UFO has some technical limitations at the moment though, it doesnt do
> > a bunch of important stuff like metrics yet, but it seems very
> > promising. 
> UFO[1] has support for horizontal advance widths and horizontal
> (non-class) kerning. It documents, but does not support vertical
> advances for glyphs.
> 
> I get the impression that the UFO docs were written as a work in
> progress... and never updated. There are comments indicating that they
> are/were thinking about class based kerning, but no resolution to those
> comments.
> 
> UFO has no support for contextual positioning, single glyph positioning,
> nor some of the other GPOS lookup types.
> 
> UFO has no support for ligatures nor any other substitutions (no GSUB at
> all).
> 
> UFO appears to support the ttf 'name' table -- but only for one language
> (which to my mind renders this support useless).
> 
> ===========================================================
> On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 11:28, Raph Levien wrote:
> > Dave's suggestion of UFO is also
> > plausible as a source format, but as far as I know it isn't widely
> > used - certainly until FontForge has native support for it.
> Ok, the (fontforge) cvs tree now contains the ability to read/write UFO
> and GLIF files. Or it contains the ability to read/write what I think
> UFO & GLIF files look like -- all I can actually say is that ff can read
> it's own output -- I've never seen a real UFO bundle.
> 
> If anyone has such a thing I would appreciate it if you could test.
> 
> FF's implementation does support vertical advances, and I made the
> obvious extension to support vertical (non-class based) kerning.
> 
> Large fonts get loaded slowly because there are so many tiny files to
> open and parse.
> 
> [1] http://just.letterror.com/ltrwiki/UnifiedFontObject
> 

Cool George. Could you please add tasks and items to our Roadmap:
http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap

I'm curious how this community can best plug into fontforge and other
font tools. There seems to be a large need for font development and
management tools, so I'm curious how this project can plug into these
concerns. You seem to be the perfect person to lead this charge. Would
you be interested in pushing our external tools, as you already are?
Part of this would be to use our wiki to add up what tools we need to
develop and how to extend current ones.

Also, I'm curious whatever happened to the GTK-version of fontforge?
Would you ever be interested in having a GTK or KDE front-end to ff?

Jon

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Jon Phillips

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