Re: [Fontforge-devel] Let's strive to do better than that

[Alexey K. <ana...@ya...>]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2011 23:41:25 +0400
Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

> If you do things like adding new glyphs for existing font or doing
> vectorization, in my experience, usually you have bits of glyphs that
> represent characteristic parts, so you don't have to repeat drawing
> all the complex curves every single time. You simply make a kind of
> library and reconstruct new glyphs from those bits. Still with me?
> 
> But that means you do a lot of sum and division boolean stuff and you
> have to copy/paste and drag stuff around. In comparison to Inkscape
> it's unneccessarily complicated in FontForge.

Well, as far as I can see the only boolean operation which is
really needed when working with glyph components is union: it is called
"remove overlap" in FontForge. I can't imagine a situation where a
division would be useful. But in most cases glyph features you can copy
or drag would be represented with open paths, which (if I understand
correctly) don't allow any such boolean operations. Making new glyphs
from existing components is mainly about cutting and joining contours,
and this should always be done at the point level.

> I made a clear distinction between font design and font production.>
> Inkscape doesn't (yet) have tools that assist things like controlling
> weight of a glyph, true enough (insetting is a different beast). But
> the really basic drawing and combining of bits is where I simply
> don't see FontForge beating Inkscape.

Nobody can beat a specialized font editor in making contours really
prepared for exporting into a font file. For example, how can I
be sure there are always points at extrema in Inkscape? Is there a way
to check inflection points? Or is it possible to quickly round to
integer all point coordinates? Inkscape even doesn't have the concept
of constraint (tangent) points!

On the other hand, I think there is really no point for discussion
here. Font design is not just about drawing contours: it is also
hinting, OpenType scripting and thousand other things. If you like to
do your drawing stuff in a specialized graphics editor, you'll still
need a font editor to convert a bunch of glyphs into a real font. In the
Windows world there are many font designers which prefer to draw
contours in Illustrator or Corel Draw, but still use FontLab as their
production tool, and they don't damn FontLab.

-- 
Regards,
Alexey Kryukov <anagnost at yandex dot ru>

Moscow State University
Historical Faculty