[OpenFontLibrary] workflow hints

[Khaled Hosny]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 09:32:48AM +0200, Ben Laenen wrote:
> 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.

Not my experience, I do post-edit the file before committing, but it is
usually few cosmetics, nothing big, the last time I used the dejavu
scripts they broke my files, my be I did something wrong, but this was a
while ago and I didn't check again since then.

> 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 :-)

Indeed, UFO is anything but a good exchange format, FF's font dir might
be much more reliable.

> > 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.

Compared to UFO, it is much better, especially if you can't use
FF for some reason. Adobe feature files can be considered too.

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer