little scripting help required

donat raetzo

I am looking for help for a font project. I have developed some masters in parallel, now I have font source files that need to be merged into single files for further development. Those fonts I start with cover Mac OS Roman encoding.

Example: First file has regular glyphs and numbers, second file has four alternate glyphs and Old style Figure designs (in the main numbers slots). Those two sources should become just one, the 10-14 additional glyphs (in font "B" marked with color) with all their kerning, prepared with correct suffixes (.alt, .osf) to be used with OpenType features in the end. This procedure for 4x two source files: The upright designs in Light and Bold and the italic designs in Light and Bold. 

My source files are .vfc (could be saved to a format of your preference) and should result in a format I can further work with in Fontlab. 

I was eager to look into scripting, I did read interesting threads here on TD. I did exercises with DrawBot. But honestly, scripting exceeds my capabilities. I would be thankful to find a professional among you who could help me with this.

The amount of work seems manageable, it is probably rather you are doing me a favour. If you are interested please send me a note with how I could compensate you for your work. Thank you!

Thomas Phinney

If it wasn’t for the kerning in the file that has the alts/OSFs, this would be so easy as to be nearly trivial.

I think one viable approach would involve taking the files that have the alts/OSFs, and renaming those glyphs with suffixes to their final names while still in that file. Then it will be possible to do whatever merge operation is needed, without collisions.

Kent Lew

What Thomas advises is essentially how we merged the Font Bureau library decades ago. There was an intermediate step of compare kerning data to make sure there were no accidental conflicts/discrepancies between kerning for the same base glyphs across fonts before merging.