NOTE: This is in prototype state, lacks basic features such as saving modifications or exporting to binary formats (.ttf, .otf, etc). It's more of a "what if?" than a tool at this early point.
So, for fun I started making a UFO font editor that's libre/gratis and open source. The technology stack is the gtk GUI library and the Rust programming language. I'm a programmer by trade so I'm interested to know what type professionals think of it and whether it's a worthy endeavor to pursuit for actual type development.
The UI is unpolished because it's going through changes at this early stage. As stated it in the github site, the following list describes the goals of the project:
- Fun
- Good UX not necessarily tied to prior art
- Reasonable performance
- Configurability
- Use visual feedback for all kinds of operations to inform the user
of the current state (for example, a Bézier path tool that shows you the
current curve's degree and progress).
Some other goals:
- Compatibility with python scripts for Glyphs and Fontforge
- Complete support of UFO format
- Everything (Project, masters, glyph groups, glyphs, contours, standalone curves/splines, guidelines, etc) is an object whose properties can be introspected and edited like in Blender.
Some videos/images I've made the past few weeks showcasing what I was currently working on:
Guidelines as introspect-able objects (Video)
Raw unfinished bezier pen tool (Video)
Editing existing bezier curves (Video) not final behavior/look
Comments
Will certainly do, thank you! kurbo will be useful in the future, when spline modifications are implemented.
However, looking at the demos and description, I don’t really understand what makes it different from the existing apps. If you’re willing to spend so much time on it, I think it would make sense to collaborate with a practicing type designer/foundry and start by finding the pain points of the current apps. The problem is that those pain points are easy to fix with plugins. In my view, making a whole new useful editor is possible, but it requires a lot of work and understanding of the font design process.
Nonetheless, I think there’s a market for plugins. Also, a lot of people could benefit from something better than Adobe apps.
What would your be your OS support goal? Personally, I would love to see more font editor options available for OSs other than mac OS.
I think we are well past the point in number of font editor projects (both in general and in Rust-based open source ones), where the world would benefit more from more people-per-project, rather than more projects.
Ooh, I can answer this one: simplicity and ergonomics. MFEK is a great project but Fred has (deliberately) never used a commercial font editor and his desired user interface and workflow is considerably different from that of most designers. Runebender is designed to be a pilot project for a new set of user interface widgets so its development tends to have far more time spent on reinventing the GUI world using new (and therefore unfamiliar) tools than actually making a font editor, which in turn makes it slow to emerge difficult to contribute to. But the libraries that both of these systems have produced (kurbo, norad, MFEKmath, etc.) are useful components to a more user-friendly and conventional editor.
If I had the time to hack on any of these things, I'd probably be working on gerb.
I completely agree with this view. My plan is to focus on the UI, contribute to the existing Rust font ecosystem if needed.
It's possible to expose Rust data to python (I've written a small proof of concept here for running python scripts against a Rust API on a Rust application) but I don't have any experience with Jupyter notebooks let alone developing for them. Sounds very interesting and possible though! 🤔