Pilcrow: A variable font creator

Simon Cozens

I know that most people are building variable fonts from inside their font editing software, but if your chosen font editing software doesn't provide good variable font creation tooling, you're left fiddling around with designspace files and fontmake.

If that's you, you may want to look at a new piece of software I've written called Pilcrow, which is essentially a graphical user interface to creating designspace files and running them through fontmake with the appropriate options.

It works on Mac OS, Linux, and probably Windows if you have a Python installation and infinite patience. It's pre-release at this stage, so please give it a go and kick the tires, and let me know via the issue tracker if it does something it shouldn't or doesn't do something it should.

Thomas Phinney

Or, you are doing a font for Google and are required to use a Fontmake+UFO+DesignSpace build workflow, regardless of what your font editor can do!

John Hudson

Well, to be fair, Google’s requirement is that there is a reproducible build process that doesn’t rely on commercially licensed software. Fontmake+UFO+DesignSpace is just how it shakes out most of the time.

Adam Jagosz

Not necessarily. FontLab doesn't allow mark/mkmk in VF's which fontmake is a good cure for (if only FontLab UFO exports were a bit more consistent and predictable!).