[Fontforge-devel] fontforge in the field

[Martin H. <mar...@si...>]

Dear All,

I've just returned from giving a workshop on Indic Unicode font development based on fontforge. It was very successful and fontforge performed admirably. This was the first time we had run fontforge up against fontlab as a possible development tool and fontforge stood up very well. The following are key features that I found valuable:

1. We had the source code. I was able to make a few patches to give the designers some core features they wanted.
2. sfd is a textual format. I was able to write a program sfdmerge that does a 3 way ancestral merge for version control. I was also able to dig myself out of the holes caused by a bug in said program!
3. spiros are cool. One particular font that was being cleaned up had a lot of corner points (complete with real corners) where curve points should have been used. A simple matter of selecting the curve, changing all the points to spiro g4s and then converting back to cubic splines and simplifying removed much of the junk.

So what did we learn from the process. Well there are a number of areas of improvement I would like to see in fontforge as a result:

1. Add validation options to test rsb and/or lsb being < a certain value (e.g. 0)

2. Add accelerator key for view/fill. I enclose a patch (fill_key.diff) that sets this to Ctl+Shft+Y but any single key stroke would do.

3. Add show point positions. I enclose a patch (pointnumbers.diff) which adds this to the View/Point Numbers menu. Being able to show all the point positions is helpful to designers so they can check alignments etc.

4. Fontforge crashes if an anchorclass is declared in a .sfd referencing a non existent lookup

5. In GSUB multiple substitutions, the hover showing the glyphs has the arrow pointing in the wrong direction.

6. It's very hard to move anchor classes between lookup subtables.

7. Typing glyphs into the metrics window is really hard work. Can we be enabled to add glyphs to the metric window by glyph name?

8. If you add a lookup or an anchorclass and then delete it, you can't add another with the same name without restarting fontforge.

9. It would be very helpful to add the concept of global classes that can be referenced in contextual chaining rules.

10. When I attach a second monitor and so increase my x pixels by a factor of 2, the menu/text font in fontforge doubles in size.

11. I enclose a patch (glyph_label.diff) to make the glyph label in the fontview have its baseline on the bottom of the label rather than sometimes the label floating downwards beyond readability.

Yours,
Martin