How to add name table entries with FontTools?

Paul van der Laan

I'd like to manipulate name table data in a number of generated font files. So far I discovered how to access (and manipulate) name table entries that are already defined in the file:

from fontTools import ttLib

ttPath = '/Volumes/test.ttf'

ttFont = ttLib.TTFont(ttPath)

nameTable = ttFont['name'].names

print nameTable

>> [<NameRecord NameID=0; PlatformID=1; LanguageID=0>, ... ] 

But what I'd like to do is to add new entries. I suppose I need to construct new NameRecord objects first in order to append them to the name table, but I have no idea how to achieve this.

Any pointers?

Matthew Butterick

You can generalize from the technique described here:

1. Extract the name table: ttx -t name test.ttf

2. Edit the resulting XML file (test.ttx) as you wish.

3. Merge it back into your font: ttx -m test.ttf test-edited.ttx

There may be a way to do the same work within Python via direct manipulation of data structures. But since ttx is designed to convert things to XML and back, I think it’s more prudent to manipulate the XML.

Paul van der Laan

Thanks for the answer, Matthew!

I know TTX is great for doing this stuff, but still I’d prefer to do this directly in Python.

Paul van der Laan

Never mind, I found it. This will do the trick:

from fontTools.ttLib.tables._n_a_m_e import NameRecord

myRecord = NameRecord()
myRecord.nameID = 128
myRecord.platformID = 64
myRecord.platEncID = 32
myRecord.langID = 16
myRecord.string = 'testing'

ttfont['name'].names.append(myRecord)

Eli Heuer

I was looking for something like the above example, and this snippet is working well for me. Thanks Paul!

Jens Kutilek

There also is a helper method now which was not around in 2014:

table__n_a_m_e.addMultilingualName(self, names, ttFont=None, nameID=None, windows=True, mac=True)

It will choose a free name ID (if you pass nameID=None) automatically and return it. 'names' is a dictionary with the name in multiple languages, such as {'en': 'Pale', 'de': 'Blaß', 'de-CH': 'Blass'}

Or, similar, but simpler if you don't want multilingual entries:

table__n_a_m_e.addName(self, string, platforms=((1, 0, 0), (3, 1, 0x409)), minNameID=255)