Question about Font Engineers

Aleme Tadesse

What exactly font engineers do?
How are they diffrent from type designers ?

Thanks 

James Puckett

Font engineers are the people who can make fonts work so type designers don’t have to. At the simplest this might just be working out vertical metrics and font family naming.

Coding and testing OpenType features can also be the work of a font engineer. As you get into the world of non-Latin languages with lots of OpenType programming font engineering can get pretty complicated.

Some font engineers handle programming for type designers. A lot of redundant work in type design can be automated with Python programming. This gets back into the non-Latin and OpenType world, where people are writing Python code that generates OpenType code. 

Font engineers also handle final font testing. After a typeface is finished someone has to make sure that it works across Mac, Windows, Adobe Apps, and web browsers. Depending on how thorough one wants to be this is a lot of work and some type designers prefer to outsource it.

Aleme Tadesse

Thank you James so much.
this can get quite expensive too right ?
how is the price determined?
per work? Per hour ?

thanks again.

Josh Nychuk

@James Puckett Your response is very helpful, I'm researching the font mastering process, which I believe is handled by an engineer.

Do you have any tips, resources or references you can share for outsourcing this process?

Sérgio Martins

Aleme Tadesse said:

Thank you James so much.
this can get quite expensive too right ?
how is the price determined?
per work? Per hour ?

thanks again.

The price, as a few other details, might vary from engineer to engineer and work to work.
As for getting quite expensive, well, that would depend on how much work you'd need the engineer to do and how specialised that work is.

Mike Duggan

if Hinting is needed for the project, I think would fall under the Font Engineering bracket, as many type designers, either do not have the expertise or the time to do Hinting work

PabloImpallari

As years go on you became a bit of both. Since fonts are also programs that needs a fucking lot of techy stuff

Josh Nychuk

Yeah, learning it's insanely techy at times... and at a bit of an impasse... I've drawn all my glyphs, happy with the spacing, kerning, metrics, contours... but would like to take it across the finish line and use the typeface for professional projects and on the web.

I believe the next steps are:

• Hinting: optimizing for screen at small sizes
• OpenType: writing features (found this resource) and table info (clueless here?)
• Formats: OTF + WOFF

Any how-to resources for the above would be greatly appreciated!

Mike Duggan

what program are you using to design the font?

Josh Nychuk

@Mike Duggan I'm using RoboFont.

Mike Duggan

I see ok. With regards to hinting, you should determine if Hinting is needed. If its a Display face for example, intended for use at larger sizes, perhaps no hinting is needed. A text face might need hinting. For autohinting you can use TTFAutohint. For greater control of Hinting, VTT from Microsoft also has a built in Autohinter and an interface to edit the hinting. Be aware however that VTT has a pretty steep learning curve. for both ttfautohint and VTT autohinting, proofing the hinted results is strongly recommended. 

there is a lot of information out there on OpenType, the Glyphs website has good deal of info

I am sure others more familiar with the Robofont workflow will comment. 

Josh Nychuk

WOW, thanks @Mike Duggan!

These are both very helpful resources. I didn't think to check another font design app for info, and it looks like Glyphs does a very good job with "how-to" content.

Thanks again.

Simon Cozens

Joshnychuk said:

• OpenType: writing features (found this resource) and table info (clueless here?)
• Formats: OTF + WOFF

Any how-to resources for the above would be greatly appreciated!

Check out my recently revised Fonts And Layout for Global Scripts, which is rapidly becoming a brain dump of everything I know about font engineering.

DanRhatigan

Tal Leming's http://opentypecookbook.com/ is another resource worth checking out to wrap your head around writing OT features

Josh Nychuk

Thanks @Simon Cozens! Lot's to dig into here Appreciate the knowledge share.

Thanks @DanRhatigan! This was my only resource but great to call out again.

Dave Crossland

Google Fonts has been supporting the development of the Font Bakery project for a few years, along with other contributing foundries, and other tools for font engineering tasks.

I'm aware of http://www.alphabet-type.com and https://www.daltonmaag.com offering font engineering services, and there are many freelancers offering such services too.

Josh Nychuk

Thank you @Dave Crossland! this is fantastic.

I'm going to learn the engineering process with this first typeface to be better informed to work with freelance engineers in the future. Appreciate the advice.