[OpenFontLibrary] workflow hints

[Schrijver]

> 
> 
> In other words, would it be considered polite to just distribute
> FontForge source and expect someone contribute a script that exports
> it to UFO or whatever, in case that someone really-really needs it?
> 
> Alexandre Prokoudine
> http://libregraphicsworld.org


Well that depends. If you see the font as a finished work already that might make sense. But if you are serious about collaboration on your font imho you need to set up some kind of infrastructure for that; just like if you’re doing a software project.

Of course I have no clue what kind of project you are working on and what scope it is—I’m curious to know! 

What you see most I guess is that people spread a ttf and maybe a fontforge file on their website and the oflb. Nothing inherently wrong with that.

But I think both Nicolas and me proposed in our talks that font development can be taken a step further when taking cues from software development (no Nicolas?).

This involves technology; but I’m inclined to think it will only get more easy as more people start to use these technologies and new interfaces get invented; sites like GitHub and Launchpad are already making it a whole lot easier to host your projects; and we can help each other out on the mailing list.

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Practical:

Fontforge exports to UFO without programming, btw.

It actually does most things I just mentioned without programming; for example generating the font files can be done from the menu. Writing scripts is just a way of speeding up the workflow and making it more robust.

You could actually come up with collaboration strategies around Fontforge’s own format too; I think they made a plain-text version of it for this purpose. (And I think this is in Nicolas’ templates as well). The main reason why you would want to use UFO is that it is agnostic to the editor being used.

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Cheers,
Eric