From Fontlab to Glyphs

Andrea T.
Andrea T. Posts: 40
in Font Technology
Hello everybody,

i've always designed typefaces with fontlab software, actually fontlab VI. 
Now i m working on a project in a group that use to design with Glyphs. The Fontlab macros that export files in Glyphs native format doesn't work anymore on FLVI. Can be .ufo file format a good way to export a single master in order to migrate to Glyphs? There are any other options to export in a font file readable in Glyphs without losing data?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give me.
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Comments

  • Nikolaus Waxweiler
    Nikolaus Waxweiler Posts: 31
    UFO support is a bit of a sore point for FL6, still. We are in contact with the FL team to push for UFO3 support, but the one in the latest stable build will not round-trip an existing UFO 100% intact. That's a showstopper for us. I haven't tested UFO2 support extensively though. Maybe the next release will improve the situation.

    At the same time, UFO support isn't that great in Glyphs, either, and it currently only supports UFO2. You might have more luck with the new glyphsLib scripts (http://typedrawers.com/discussion/2779/glyphslib-v3-0-0-now-with-better-round-tripping-between-glyphs-app-source-files-and-ufos#latest) that transform between UFOs and Glyphs source files.

    You can try exporting your master to a UFO, loading it into Glyphs and exporting it again. Compare the differences with a tool like WinMerge (I suppose you're on Windows? There are other tools for Mac, of course) after you normalize both UFOs with the Python script https://pypi.org/project/ufonormalizer/. Maybe the conversion works well enough for you.


  • Jasper de Waard
    Jasper de Waard Posts: 641
    My experience is that the most effective way of porting to Glyphs is by opening up an .otf in Glyphs. You lose some opentype feature code, and components, but those are usually easy to recreate. 
  • Ray Larabie
    Ray Larabie Posts: 1,436
    I don't use Glyphs but here's something I've often used for importing a compiled font into FLS. Import a TTF & OTF of the same font. Copy the OTF outlines to the mask then swap with mask. That way the components are intact and you retain the better quality curves. Maybe that's something you can do in Glyphs?
  • Andrea T.
    Andrea T. Posts: 40
    ok i've made some trial using an old project to find the best way:
    1_trying to export .designspace from FLVI and then open it with Glyph (latest version 1141): it doesn't save any name of the font but on the contrary doesn't gives errors on the opentype features code, at the end i can generate a .otf
    2_trying to export .UFO from FLVI and the open it with Glyph: it seems to save everything but it gives me error with open type features, no way to produce an .otf.

    in both cases it duplicates a lot of classes:


    i cannot say anything about the outline it seems to be ok...

    PS to open a simple .otf in glyph it doesn't save any classes

  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,899
    Andrea, can you share your files with us so we can look at what is going wrong with the duplicate classes, etc.? You could attach them to a support ticket (https://support.fontlab.com)
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 674
    edited July 2018
    The designSpace import is greatly improved in the latest cutting edge versions. And I just fixed another small bug this morning. 

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