[Openfontlibrary] new release of the Ubuntu titling font

[George Williams]

On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 19:03, Dave Crossland wrote:
> FontLab VFBs are _not_ free formats. There are two I know of, UFO and SFD.
There are also ttf, otf, pfb, etc. 

Reading these standard formats is trivial, there isn't the huge loss of
information you get when you go from source code to executable. There's
very little info stored in the sfd which is not in the ttf/otf final
font. 

The distinction between source and final product isn't really relevant
in the font world -- or I don't think it is.

Don't know what's in VFB as FontLab doesn't have any description they
can provide. I assume they are similar in capabilities to an sfd file.

Adam T. has asked me for a description of the sfd format (and didn't
tell me not to tell others), so at some point FontLab might support that
too.
> 
> 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.