[OpenFontLibrary] workflow hints

[Barry Schwartz]

Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine at gmail.com> skribis:
> I'm finally looking inside
> http://oflb.open-fonts.org/foo-open-font-sources-2.0.tar.gz that
> Nicolas mentioned during his talk at LGM. Is there some kind of
> description of the recommended workflow? Like doing everything in
> separate UFO files and then combining them in FF, or working on a
> FontForge project and then exporting all glyphs to separate files
> using some script. Stuff like that. Anyone?

For collaborative development the biggest problem (to my thinking) is
how to merge changes gracefully using a source code management system
designed mainly for separate compilation units. Perhaps UFO is a
solution to this problem, but I don't know. There is no way it would
work for me; I've got my stuff in a combination of sfd, feature files,
and python, with fontforge features hijacked to perform tasks for
which they never were intended.

My fear is that UFO will be to fontmaking as GNU Hurd is to
GNU. Making tools to ease merging of sfd fonts seems, perhaps, a more
worthwhile endeavor. If some people are using fontforge and others are
using proprietary ware then the problem arises of how to keep the
project itself from being a slave to the proprietary ware, and that
might be really difficult. It would be necessary that nothing peculiar
to the proprietary editor be contained in the font; and the
proprietary editor would have to be able to handle peculiarities of
fontforge that it might encounter. In the case of my own fonts, it
would have to handle my spacing-by-anchors system, which may be a
nontrivial requirement.

Often it is best simply to say "Use GNU make" rather than try to write
a Makefile that works on everything. :)