[OpenFontLibrary] workflow hints

[Ben Laenen]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:53 AM, Peter Baker <b.tarde at gmail.com> wrote:
> Couple of quick points. First, the FontForge format has always been
> plain text. It works well with CVS, SVN, etc.

Only if you cut out the unneeded bits like we do with DejaVu. If we
would forget to run that script and commit a change to SVN we'd get
something like a 2 MB patch.

Anyway, FontForge's normalized SFD format is by far the best we've got
for collaborative font development.

> It isn't really
> human-editable, but it contain everything--outlines, hints or
> instructions, OT features, kerning, etc. Second, UFO by contrast is
> woefully incomplete: it knows nothing about TrueType instructions, for
> example, or OpenType features. The slowness of its development is
> baffling to me, considering the importance of the things that are
> still missing. I flirted with it for a while but had to give it up.

I should have read further down this thread before complaining on UFO myself :-)

> Strangely, the binary font formats remain very good for exchange. Both
> the major editors read them!

You'd still lose a lot of metadata though, like OpenType rule names
for which there's no room in the ttf file. And it's absolutely not
suited for collaboration.

Ben