[Openfontlibrary] Raph's font format

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Raph!

> First and foremost, the file format I use for storing master outlines
> will not be based on Bezier curves. Rather, it is an interpolating
> spline similar to Ikarus and Metafont, but with some interesting new
> features that I believe make them absolutely ideal for font design.

Sounds like JUST the kind of 'secret sauce' the Free Font Movement
needs to leverage itself beyond what is possible in the proprietary
font world! :-)

> My choice for the underlying syntax is s-expressions

Nice :-)

I've always been curious about Lisp, so this will be good to see when its out.

> This is because
> s-expressions are easily powerful enough to meet my needs, yet so
> simple that they can be roundtripped in 30 lines or so of Python, and
> not many more of C. By contrast, an XML parser is a pretty major
> effort.

While observing the Lisp siren at arms length, I've seen xml-to-sexp
tools and Erik Naggum style rants about how xml is just reinventing
sexps badly, and I'm also aware of DSSL. This is probably useless
or already well known, heh

[0]: http://packages.debian.org/testing/devel/xml-to-sexp
[1]: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9a30c508201627ee

> This file format is nearly self-evident. You could convert this to
> Ikarus format and use Ikarus tools, and you'd get ok results.

I think this will be of some interest to older font developers who
remember Ikarus :-)

> provide at least as much power as
> Metafont and Multiple Master, but with graphical interaction based on
> sliders and reference frames, rather than PhD-level constraint
> programming

WOW! :-))

I've been leafing through the MetaFont Tutorial [3] as I used it as a
test file for lulu.com printing, and was thinking of cooking up some
kind of MetaFont interface as a toy interaction/font development
project. But this sounds killer :-)

[3]: http://metafont.tutorial.free.fr/

> or having to come up with 2^n masters and have highly
> nonintuitive rules about their structure being "compatible."

The way I've explained MM is with a colour wheel metaphor
which is if you take a square palette and kids paints, and in
each corner put down brilliant bright red,
green, yellow and blue, and mix them towards the center, you get a
murky browny purple colour. You can get a nice colour in the middle by
making the corner colours less intense, though. MM does this to font
interpolation.

> UFO is
> definitely a possibility for such things, but from what I can see is
> still pretty unfinished.

Forking UFO would be very bad - trying to attract the more technically
savvy font developers, who all use RoboFab and UFO, is a definite goal
of the Free Font Movement.

I think with some seriously cool and strongly copylefted (ie, GPL
excepted idea patents in the USA :-) new font tech, they might be
persuaded to join the Free Software community.

> To sum, I think having my own format is more a case of healthy
> diversity than gratuitous fragmentation

Especially if you're cutting conversion code :-)

-- 
Regards,
Dave