[OpenFontLibrary] versioning

[eric at authoritism.net]

Hi Dave,

On Thu, 7 May 2009 16:21:00 -0400, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> 2009/5/7 Schrijver <eric at authoritism.net>:
>>
>> One exciting development I didn’t mention yet on the list, is that
>> GitHub
>> now supports visualising UFO’s:
> 
> Whats the best free replacement for github? Trac perhaps?
>

Trac by default uses SVN and has no support for other versioning systems
initially;
but these can be enabled via plugins

I know Redmine has support for many VCSs baked in, http://www.redmine.org/

But there must also be other alternatives, I do not really know this field.


>> However there still is a gap within this workflow—how do you generate
>> distributable font files from the UFO?
>> It would be great if you could do that programmaticaly, so you could
have
>> a
>> completely hosted solution, where you can download snapshot-fonts of the
>> development process…
> 
> FontForge can do it very easily with python scripting:
> 
> $ git clone git://github.com/rbmntjs/open-baskerville.git
> $ cat > ufo2ttf.py << EOF
> #!/usr/bin/python
> import fontforge, sys
> fontIn = sys.argv[1]
> fontOut = sys.argv[2]
> thisFont = fontforge.open(fontIn)
> thisFont.generate(fontOut,flags=("round", "dummy-dsig",
> "PfEd-comments", "PfEd-colors", "PfEd-lookups", "PfEd-guidelines",
> "PfEd-background"))
> EOT
> $ python font.py open-baskerville/OpenBaskerville.ufo ob.ttf
> 
> Then you have ob.ttf to do with what you will.

Funky!

Could you do this on a webserver? Say, having a copy of fontforge running
on the server, spitting out files on request? (or on each commit, for
example)?

I had thought of scripting Fontforge but it seemed a bit heavyweight for
hosted solutions, it would be really cool if you have a hosted
collaborative environment where people can work on a typeface via a
flexible format like UFO, but the process also produces distributable
files, so interested onlookers can just get, try and use the fonts without
having to set up on entire collaboration environment locally.

It might be a major hassle to implement, but I could imagine something like
this for the OFLB, where each font becomes a little repository you can
submit patches to, or start their your fork from. Conceptually, this seems
to already be sort of the model, because its recommended to include the
source files (for collaboration), and you can 'remix' other fonts (like
forking).

Eric