Scripts needed?

Joel Santos

Hey guys!

I'm thinking on returning to typography once again (it must be the third time). I've been concentrating myself in code essentially for the past years and I think I will continue with it but every time I come around my type books, my "still to finish" work or whenever I receive some money from MyFonts on one of the fonts I have that I wouldn't use I think: "Should I get back?"

So, as somewhat a transition, "what if I started by doing some scripts that would help me and other developers?"
I'm a pretty good developer so I don't think this would be that hard.

Are you finding a lack in that subject? Something you would like to see done?

Hannes Famira

Hey Joel, Robofont needs a simple and straight forward extension for building accents. Interested?

Jens Kutilek

@Hannes Famira I don’t know if it counts as simple and straight forward, but my AnchorOverlayTool for RoboFont contains some helpers for accent letters. Especially the Recompose function: It sets the width of the accented glyph to that of the base glyph and positions the accent components based on the anchor positions. It doesn’t know which accent goes on which letter, but if you have the accented letters built in one UFO, you can copy them over to any font and use the Recompose script to correct the widths and positions.

Joel Santos

It seems like you already have a solution ehehe.

To be straight, I also don't think RoboFont is that interesting. There is Glyphs, being in Python should be cross platform and... I don't find the appeal, specially with the price in  mind. Sorry.

Joel Santos

What about a simple app to test fonts with templates like "headings" and "simulated book page"...? Would that be useful?

Mark Simonson

I don't know if you do iOS apps, but I've often wished I had an app that could let me preview on my iPhone or iPad fonts stored on, say, DropBox or other cloud-based things. OTF and TTF at minimum, but UFO and .glyphs would be even better. The reason is, I sometimes want to show other people what I'm working on, and I don't always have PDF samples handy. Something like Quicklook in the Finder, even better if it had simple text editing.

PabloImpallari

Joel Santos said:

What about a simple app to test fonts with templates like "headings" and "simulated book page"...? Would that be useful?

You can use the Testing page for that. https://github.com/impallari/Font-Testing-Page
And Mark, you can quickly create a PDF just by printing from the Testing Page.

---

This is a very rough concept prototype of a new kerning tool that will allow people to kern in the context of real words. It can show you sample kerned and unkerned words for each individual font, and ideally it will update as you kern new pairs.

It's just a prototype and using it now is a pain in the ass as you need to do a lot of steps, so I would love to have someone turn it it to a real app
https://github.com/impallari/Contextual-Kerning-Tool

Ray Larabie

How about tools for color fonts?  Some tools exist but not too many.

Mark Simonson

And Mark, you can quickly create a PDF just by printing from the Testing Page.

Sure, but I have to remember to do it ahead of time.

Joel Santos

Ray Larabie said:

How about tools for color fonts?  Some tools exist but not too many.

That seems interesting. I've been wondering about color fonts also. They seem a new interesting subject to evolve upon since there are so many typefaces around and not that much prepared for color fonts.

PabloImpallari said:

Joel Santos said:

What about a simple app to test fonts with templates like "headings" and "simulated book page"...? Would that be useful?

You can use the Testing page for that. https://github.com/impallari/Font-Testing-Page
And Mark, you can quickly create a PDF just by printing from the Testing Page.

--- 

This is a very rough concept prototype of a new kerning tool that will allow people to kern in the context of real words. It can show you sample kerned and unkerned words for each individual font, and ideally it will update as you kern new pairs.

It's just a prototype and using it now is a pain in the ass as you need to do a lot of steps, so I would love to have someone turn it it to a real app
https://github.com/impallari/Contextual-Kerning-Tool

That still needs to be setup without an actual need but let me tell you that is pretty interesting and most of the idea I was talking about.

Mark Simonson said:

I don't know if you do iOS apps, but I've often wished I had an app that could let me preview on my iPhone or iPad fonts stored on, say, DropBox or other cloud-based things. OTF and TTF at minimum, but UFO and .glyphs would be even better. The reason is, I sometimes want to show other people what I'm working on, and I don't always have PDF samples handy. Something like Quicklook in the Finder, even better if it had simple text editing.

Well that would be part of the idea I was telling regarding templating and stuff...

Johannes Neumeier

How about a tool, command line or standalone app, that let's you easily compile subset webfonts for different language or charset support, together with some metadata adjustments etc. This could for example be used in the backend of indie foundries letting customers download file size conscious webfonts tailored to the customers' need, or provide on-the-fly webfonts with small footprint based on a language selection.

Jasper de Waard

This is probably quite complex, but it would be great if you could find a way to incorporate the rendering engines from different operating systems within one app, so that I could upload a webfont into it, and instantly see how it renders in all those environments, using simple self-made testpages (these could be just text-based) or built-in stuff like waterfalls and pangrams and such.

Thomas Phinney

FontLab VI has the Windows ClearType renderer, even in the Mac version alongside the Apple renderer. Don’t know that anyone else has managed this.

Jasper de Waard

@Thomas Phinney That's some impressive stuff. Can you show some screenshots from how that would work/look? Thoughts about adding XP?

Georg Seifert

The problem is that there is not one Windows Cleartype. The result looks a bit different in each browser. So you need to check each browser/app in a real environment and even on different versions of Windows. 

Thomas Phinney

This is true. ClearType is not a single thing, exactly.

James Puckett

Will Fontlab VI allow Cleartype parameter tweaking? A dropdown of different OS and browser rendering options might be useful. Or overkill.

Jasper de Waard

Agreed, there are still differences, but having some idea of what effect a change to a glyph has in a cleartype-based situation probably saves a lot of time. Having to reinstall a webfont and refresh all testpages after every change is a hassle.

Mike Duggan

although its not browser based, VTT will allow you to proof with a high level of confidence how things will look in the browser, for a number of different ClearType rendering conditions. So even if you are not using VTT to hint the font, you can use it to proof the hinting

Joel Santos

Jasper de Waard said:

This is probably quite complex, but it would be great if you could find a way to incorporate the rendering engines from different operating systems within one app, so that I could upload a webfont into it, and instantly see how it renders in all those environments, using simple self-made testpages (these could be just text-based) or built-in stuff like waterfalls and pangrams and such.

Yep. Possible but pretty complex. Maybe you're better off just using browserstack for example.

Johannes Neumeier said:

How about a tool, command line or standalone app, that let's you easily compile subset webfonts for different language or charset support, together with some metadata adjustments etc. This could for example be used in the backend of indie foundries letting customers download file size conscious webfonts tailored to the customers' need, or provide on-the-fly webfonts with small footprint based on a language selection.

That seems interesting! Since I'm a web dev this makes sense for me. So many times I'm just looking for latin for websites that will only have english for example.

Beau Williamson

I've been thinking of a little app for a while now, but my nascent coding skills have kind of stalled for now. Just a simple text interface that lets you work on kerning on your phone or tablet. The increased screen resolution is great for working smaller and you could whip out your tablet wherever you are and get some work done. Then the kerning file generated could be swapped into the font later.

Joel Santos

Beau Williamson said:

I've been thinking of a little app for a while now, but my nascent coding skills have kind of stalled for now. Just a simple text interface that lets you work on kerning on your phone or tablet. The increased screen resolution is great for working smaller and you could whip out your tablet wherever you are and get some work done. Then the kerning file generated could be swapped into the font later.

I'm actually thinking about the uses I can give to my iPad. One would be for the rough sketches of fonts instead of millions of papers laying around and drawing on top and... With the iPad you can simply use a system of layers to do this and there are so many good applications around to this. Although, regarding kerning, that is kind of a precision work right? It would be pretty hard to get that to seriously work in the tablet. I do find interesting the thing to work "on-the-go". To do work at the beach without a laptop... :P

Johannes Neumeier said:

How about a tool, command line or standalone app, that let's you easily compile subset webfonts for different language or charset support, together with some metadata adjustments etc. This could for example be used in the backend of indie foundries letting customers download file size conscious webfonts tailored to the customers' need, or provide on-the-fly webfonts with small footprint based on a language selection.

This seemed interesting to me but now that I think about it... Isn't this illegal without the consent of the type designer? What I'm thinking now is... Is there any space for a MyFonts kind of clone but directed to webfonts? That way one could "enforce" the type designer to allow that subset and I as a developer would be more interested in such thing. Do you think there is any space for another font shop?

Johannes Neumeier

Joel Santos said: Isn't this illegal without the consent of the type designer?

The type designer was the target user I had in mind

Probably Font Squirrel is closest to what you describe, but there is catalog, distribution, web and desktop as well as subsetting (as part of webfont generation) all in one.

Joel Santos

Johannes Neumeier said:

Joel Santos said: Isn't this illegal without the consent of the type designer?

The type designer was the target user I had in mind

Probably Font Squirrel is closest to what you describe, but there is catalog, distribution, web and desktop as well as subsetting (as part of webfont generation) all in one.

Font Squirrel doesn't seem that great for the type designers that want to sell. Besides that, it isn't actually a webfont service.

http://typedrawers.com/discussion/556/webfont-services-js-vs-css
Too many laying around and too much hassle :P I'll just draw type instead eheheh

Mark Simonson

The same people who do Font Squirrel also do Fontspring, which is their commercial arm. Behind the scenes it uses the same webfont generator as Font Squirrel.

Font Squirrel can also be used to generate webfonts with commercial fonts if the license allows it. Some commercial font producers even recommend this instead of providing the webfonts themselves.

Joel Santos

Mark Simonson said:

The same people who do Font Squirrel also do Fontspring, which is their commercial arm. Behind the scenes it uses the same webfont generator as Font Squirrel.

Font Squirrel can also be used to generate webfonts with commercial fonts if the license allows it. Some commercial font producers even recommend this instead of providing the webfonts themselves.

Oh. It makes sense that Font Squirrel has a commercial branch.