[Openfontlibrary] new release of the Ubuntu titling font

[Erik van Blokland]

On Jan 3, 2008, at 4:34 AM, George Williams wrote:

>> The XML schema "UFO" developed by the Robofab project could be a free
>> format, suitable for FontForge-FontLab collaboration since both
>> programs already read and write it, but I'm not sure it technically
>> can encode all the information that is encoded in a VFB file.
> UFO directories do not contain GPOS/GSUB info in their spec, they  
> appear
> to be primarily designed to store the glyph outlines. The RoboFab  
> people
> tell me GPOS/GSUB data can be included by throwing in Adobe feature
> files. Unfortunately Adobe feature files cannot express everything  
> that
> goes into GPOS/GSUB either.
>
> So assuming VFB files can contain all GPOS info, then I believe UFO
> directories cannot express everything in them.

The UFO spec doesn't have a specific place for gpos and gsub info. But  
FontLab can export the tables to UFO and import them from FontLab,  
stored in the font.lib. The tables are stored as snippets of feature  
text, pretty much straight from FontLab. Groups and kerning are stored  
separately.

We weren't sure about the way to store the features (abstract? feature  
text?) and didn't want the UFO spec to be too dependent on the way  
FontLab handles things early on. So far storing it in the lib has  
worked fine.

I'm working on objectsFF which should offer RoboFab objects in  
FontForge. If anyone want to mess around with that code as it is, let  
me know. I have some problems with kerning, groups and features, but  
that's for a different post in a different thread on a different list.

Cheers,
Erik