Robofont users: building OpenType features for complex scripts

James Puckett

Are the new Robofont tools for automatically building OpenType feature code suitable for complex scripts like Devanagari? I’m considering dropping Glyphs because the inability to disable some automatic feature generation makes troubleshooting a nightmare. But as a one-person design studio I don’t have the time to code this stuff myself. Can I do it with these new Robofont tools? I realize that they require effort to set up, but it can’t take as much time as I waste dealing with the broken fonts I’m getting from Glyphs.

attar

What tools are you talking of? feaPyFoFum?

James Puckett

Adrien Tétar said:

What tools are you talking of? feaPyFoFum?

Yes. I think there might be some other stuff people are working on based on what people have been tweeting lately.

Dan Reynolds

Adobe might have some FDK help tools, since I think all of their new Arabic, Indic, and Hebrew fonts are designed in Robofont and then generated with the FDK code.

I would also ask Mathieu Réguer in Paris, or David from Rosetta. I assume that Rosetta has built fonts using Robofont, the FDK, and custom python scripts. The same is probably true for TPTQ Arabic as well.

You may have to license these scripts from them, but those are the designers that I would ask first.

Bahman Eslami

@James Puckett 

I use a Feature builder in Robofont to create every part of the OT syntax from substitution to mark positioning and kerning. Although the code is written from scratch and it's not using any other script as kernel and I'm not sure how it will perform on other fonts. I used it to create Arabic fonts for TPTQ Arabic and ITF. I wrote it to be released later but it's still in development. Chaining contextual is in the list and there is no interface. It highly depends on unicode and also glyph naming scheme to recognize writing systems and direction of glyph. But what are your needs and what features you mostly add to your fonts?

Dave Crossland

James Puckett said:

Adrien Tétar said:

What tools are you talking of? feaPyFoFum?

Yes. I think there might be some other stuff people are working on based on what people have been tweeting lately.

Which tweets?

I wonder if you might also mean https://github.com/typemytype/GlyphConstruction or perhaps the chatter around https://github.com/behdad/fonttools/tree/master/Lib/fontTools/feaLib (such that ufo -> feaLib -> Compositor doesn't work at the moment, which is more about replacing FDK with https://github.com/googlei18n/fontmake - a pure python workflow.) However, none of those seem relevant to OpenType Feature development itself; rather that's what feaPyFoFum is for.

Dan Reynolds said:

Adobe might have some FDK help tools, since I think all of their new Arabic, Indic, and Hebrew fonts are designed in Robofont and then generated with the FDK code.

I would also ask Mathieu Réguer in Paris, or David from Rosetta. I assume that Rosetta has built fonts using Robofont, the FDK, and custom python scripts. The same is probably true for TPTQ Arabic as well.

You may have to license these scripts from them, but those are the designers that I would ask first.

James, did you take a look at https://github.com/rosettatype/yrsa/tree/master/Design (in progress) and https://github.com/rosettatype/eczar/tree/master/Design (completed) and also Dan and Mathieu's https://github.com/typeoff/martel_sans/tree/master/Martel Sans Source Files ? These are all glyphs based, the UFOs are (AFAIK) just exported from Glyphs and provided as a convenience to non-Glyphs users, but now there is https://github.com/googlei18n/glyphs2ufo and that provision is unnecessary. 

Dan Reynolds

Dave Crossland said:
just exported from Glyphs and provided as a convenience to non-Glyphs users

Yep!