loggerhead does not render fonts that are stored in bzr

[EmmaJane]

Feature Request:
I've been dabbling in the black art of font creation/development and a thread was recently opened on the Open Font Library mailing list. It talks about how VCSes could add features to support the development of fonts.

Eric wrote the following post about version control for fonts: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/2009-May/002057.html

Dave responded with the following (see URL or text below)
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/2009-May/002058.html

2009/5/7 Schrijver wrote:
> One exciting development I didn’t mention yet on the list, is that GitHub
> now supports visualising UFO’s:

Whats the best free replacement for github? Trac perhaps?

> However there still is a gap within this workflow—how do you generate
> distributable font files from the UFO?
> It would be great if you could do that programmaticaly, so you could have a
> completely hosted solution, where you can download snapshot-fonts of the
> development process…

FontForge can do it very easily with python scripting:

$ git clone git://github.com/rbmntjs/open-baskerville.git
$ cat > ufo2ttf.py << EOF
#!/usr/bin/python
import fontforge, sys
fontIn = sys.argv[1]
fontOut = sys.argv[2]
thisFont = fontforge.open(fontIn)
thisFont.generate(fontOut,flags=("round", "dummy-dsig",
"PfEd-comments", "PfEd-colors", "PfEd-lookups", "PfEd-guidelines",
"PfEd-background"))
EOT
$ python font.py open-baskerville/OpenBaskerville.ufo ob.ttf

Then you have ob.ttf to do with what you will.

Knowing virtually nothing about Python development I am going to be foolish enough to assume this could be done with a well crafted bzr plugin? Could this feature also be added to LP hosted projects?

[EmmaJane (emmajane)]

In a follow-up email [1] Dave provided the following:

"I have written a REALLY SHITTY python script [2] that does this "production" tasks for my font, and makes a very shitty kind of version control. This could probably be remade more sensibly as a BZR plugin, and a XeTeX document that produces its own test texts."

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/2009-May/002076.html
[2] http://dave.lab6.com/a/Anthozoa.txt

Kindly bear with me as I track this idea here and work towards... a plugin? Is that the best way to approach this feature request?

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

2009/5/10 EmmaJane <email address hidden>:
> In a follow-up email [1] Dave provided the following:
>
> "I have written a REALLY SHITTY python script [2] that does this
> "production" tasks for my font, and makes a very shitty kind of version
> control. This could probably be remade more sensibly as a BZR plugin,
> and a XeTeX document that produces its own test texts."
>
> [1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/openfontlibrary/2009-May/002076.html
> [2] http://dave.lab6.com/a/Anthozoa.txt
>
> Kindly bear with me as I track this idea here and work towards... a
> plugin? Is that the best way to approach this feature request?

I'm not sure. What do you want bzr to do, exactly? Render the fonts
when you view them in loggerhead?

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

[Nicolas Spalinger (yosch)]

Ideally loggerhead would provide a way to render selected glyphs (each glyph is a separate foo.glyph file: see the spec: http://unifiedfontobject.org/filestructure/glyphs.html) and would also parse and show the metadata about the font itself (this is stored in fontinfo.plist http://unifiedfontobject.org/filestructure/fontinfo.html).

BTW I'm working on adapting to bzr the fontforge script written by Max Rabkin for mercurial integration: http://freehg.org/u/taejo/ffhg/. Basically menu entries to create a local branch with your font sources, commit new revs, be able to go through the revs by launching a repository viewer, go back to a chosen revision and possibly compare two revs.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 23:35 +0000, Nicolas Spalinger wrote:
> Ideally loggerhead would provide a way to render selected glyphs (each
> glyph is a separate foo.glyph file: see the spec:
> http://unifiedfontobject.org/filestructure/glyphs.html) and would also
> parse and show the metadata about the font itself (this is stored in
> fontinfo.plist
> http://unifiedfontobject.org/filestructure/fontinfo.html).
>
> BTW I'm working on adapting to bzr the fontforge script written by Max
> Rabkin for mercurial integration: http://freehg.org/u/taejo/ffhg/.
> Basically menu entries to create a local branch with your font sources,
> commit new revs, be able to go through the revs by launching a
> repository viewer, go back to a chosen revision and possibly compare two
> revs.

I'd tackle this initially with a branch of loggerhead for fonts; and
after its feature complete look at turning it into a plugin for
loggerhead to ease maintenance.

-Rob