Final production steps

AbrahamLee

Scenario: You've just finished a great design for a family of fonts. In order to have the entire font family to be recognized and grouped properly in apps (as cross-platform as possible), what specific metadata is required? What other things should be done to make the font software rock-solid "complete"? Any good documentation resources for this kind of thing?

Thomas Phinney

Adam Twardoch wrote up an excellent explanation here:
https://forum.fontlab.com/fontlab-studio-tips-and-tricks/font-family-naming-in-fontlab-studio-5/msg841/#msg841

Although the process is specific to FontLab Studio 5, the underlying principles are applicable to all font editors.

Dave Crossland

I've attempted to capture the final production steps for Google Fonts in https://github.com/googlefonts/gf-docs/blob/master/ProjectChecklist.md and Marc Foley has developed some GlyphsApp scripts for that in https://github.com/m4rc1e/mf-glyphs-scripts

This includes 'name' table recommendations

John Hudson

Moving forward, there's also the new STAT table to consider, although if tool makers get it right, you should be able to populate the STAT table data and have the tool automatically generate the name table entries.

AbrahamLee

Wow! Thank you both, Thomas and Dave. Those are excellent resources and just what I was looking for, particularly about naming conventions.

Any info on OS/2 metrics and other kinds of metrics? PANOSE? etc.

Dave Crossland

The gf checklist was rebooted as the gf spec last year:

https://github.com/googlefonts/gf-docs/tree/main/Spec

Nick Shinn

Dave—no Book, Heavy or Ultra weight names?
Seems practical.