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using Sketch as a True Type font editor


From: Pierre HANSER
Subject: using Sketch as a True Type font editor
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 09:09:39 +0200

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.

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

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