[OpenFontLibrary] hinting workflow

[Ben Laenen]

Schrijver wrote:
> I remember a conversation at lgm with Jan, Ben and Denis about how tricky
> it is to deal with hinting in a collaborative workflow (and when deploying
> to multiple platforms).
> 
> I’m interested in hearing the experiences of the Déjà-Vu team in more
> detail. What issues did you run into? How did you solve them? Is the way
> Fontforge stores this hinting data satisfactory? (In that case it could be
> implemented in UFO in the way Erik describes).


Current FontForge format in the sfd files is just the plaintext format you see 
when you open the edit hinting dialog inside FontForge. It used to be some 
binary format (basically each instruction translated to it's number in the 
specs), but I asked to change that since these unreadable binary blobs should 
be avoided, as it's not really patch friendly.

Now, hinting of one glyph isn't really collaborative work: it's not enough 
work that you need more people to work on the same glyph. So the workflow for 
hinting is just that when someone wants to hint a glyph, he just writes the 
instructions in FF and tests it himself (usually someone else will test the 
hints as well).

I've also been looking forward to see a graphical hinter being written, 
something which is available in windows (forgot the name of the program). In 
such a program you'd basically click points to add hinting, instead of writing 
them down, which can be cumbersome and error-prone. So if you'd have such a 
program you could make a different syntax for hinting, which would be more 
high-level compared to the raw instructions. But would such a high-level 
language be a good idea for the main UFO format? I don't think so. Because 
this high-level language would be too limited for "prep" or "func" tables 
(hinting instructions which don't belong to a glyph, but to the font as a 
whole), or if you want to do funky things like the U+F000 glyph in DejaVu Sans 
which shows the current pixel size. Anyway, I can't really tell, I've never 
really thought about the graphical hinter thoroughly. Might be a good 
opportunity now to do that once...

Greetings
Ben