Hello,
I am learning a little bit if programming, and I realized I wanted a personal font editor that I could customize myself. I looked into the main font editors (Glyphs, Robofont, Fontlab 8) and I learned pretty quickly that Robofont was made entirely(?) in
Python. Python is the programming language I am best at, but I am not great. I wanted to know if anyone who has tried knows how hard it is or rewarding or really anything about trying to make my own.
I currently have Glyphs, but there are some features I want in order to streamline my own process. I am assuming by the large price tags associated with these pieces of software that
something about them is hard to make/laborious.
Thanks!
Comments
It was supposed to go in Type Design Software
To write a good font editor, you will need deep understanding of:
- Programming (because you're writing a complex program)
- Graphical user interface design and programming / UX design (because you're writing a very visual app)
- Type design (because you'll need to understand how type designers want to use such an app)
- Computational geometry (because manipulating Bézier curves is nasty)
- The OpenType font format (because you're going to be writing those things out)
Not too many people have such a specialized skillset, and the time to put it all together.Both Georg (Glyphs) and Frederik (RoboFont) were experienced type designers before they got into programming, who spent years and years on their vision to build their own editors.
If you want to add your own features, it is probably possible in existing editors. You will make it easier on yourself to start there. Python knowledge is a very good starting point, as both Glyphs and RoboFont can be heavily customized and extended with Python scripting. And both have communities that are happy to help.
Or you can try to contribute to new projects, e.g. Fontra, currently in development, which runs in the browser with a Python backend.
What features do you want to add to Glyphs?
There are also other GUI wrappers that can be used, like wxpython, which would allow the app to run on Windows and Linux as well. The FontTools Workbench is an example which uses wxpython.
py2app is also Mac-specific, though. For Windows, py2exe can be used to make the app standalone.
Judging by his/her recent Jannon specimen, Typofactory does own a Mac, so Robofont and Glyphs are both available.