Re: [Sketch-list] using Sketch as a True Type font editor

[Lauris Kaplinski]

On Wed, 31 May 2000, Pierre HANSER wrote:

> hello
> 
> I realized today Sketch was quite appropriate to generate TrueType
> fonts, and so it could become the missing TrueType font editor in
> the free software world.
> 
> The idea is to use Sketch to generate individual glyphs, and then
> to use Just Van Rossum's "FontTools" to transform them into a True
> Type font.

Yeah. Would generating reasonable font glyph outlines be the most
difficult part of font creation, there would certainly exist already
several tool for that.
The biggest obstacle is and has always been TTF bytecode generation.
Without it your font is usable only big print sizes and totally unusable
for screen display.
Actually there is lots of free TTF fonts available - but I know no one,
doing reasonable hinting.

Just my opinion,
Lauris


> 
> FontTools is a Python package which provides TrueType to Xml and
> also Xml to TrueType translations. A pointer can be found in
> Freetype link pages: http://www.freetype.org/links.html
> The proximity of xml font description and Sketch ascii file format
> seems to provide an easy path...
> 
> Sketch is a vector drawing tool, written in Python, easily
> expandable, in particular it is very easy to add and modify
> an export driver: http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Using 1) an empty font translated in Xml, 2) a sketch driver modified
> to generate FontTool-Xml glyph descriptions, it's rather easy
> to incorporate the glyph in the Xml source to generate a font.
> 
> This allows to generate simple fonts, or to modify existing ones.
> 
> To illustrate: here is a glyph in FontTools-Xml:
> ===
>     <TTGlyph name="glyph00004" xMin="716" yMin="262" xMax="1401"
> yMax="1866">
>        <contour>
>           <pt x="1453" y="1834" on="1"/>
>           <pt x="1453" y="1746" on="1"/>
>           <pt x="1266" y="1675" on="0"/>
>           ...
>           <pt x="1453" y="1921" on="1"/>
>        </contour>
>        <contour>
>           <pt x="1092" y="1520" on="1"/>
>           <pt x="1092" y="738" on="1"/>
>           ...
>           <pt x="1092" y="1520" on="1"/>
>        </contour>
>        <instructions>
>           <bytecode>
>           </bytecode>
>        </instructions>
>     </TTGlyph>
> ===
> 
> The difficulties:
> 
>  - maths in sketch driver to get accurate glyph descriptions
> 
>  - automatic adding of the glyphs in xml file
> 
>  - easy selection of where the glyph will show in various encodings,
>    hinting, ... all specialities in font descriptions
> 
>  - easy management of individual sketch drawings: a multi
>    drawing file format for Sketch would be quite pleasant there...
> 
> 
> Questions:
> 
>   for the math part, has anybody a hint on the difficulty?
> 
>   has anybody ever undertaken the same task?
> 
> I would accept gladly any comments on these ideas...
> 
>       Pierre
> 
> -- 
> mail: address@hidden
> 
> 
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