Re: [Freetype] Font Editors?

[Antoine Leca]

hemant sharma wrote:
> 
> I would like to create an OpenType font for  Devanagri . Is there any
> OpenSource Tool for this ?

You are not subscribing to the right list (Freetype is a library, and it
has nothing to do with font development).

And no, there are no really OpenSource tool for fonts that I know of,
unless of course you are willingful to quit the GUI world and accept to
develop your font using text editors and command line tools...

If you _really_ want to use OpenSource tools (why?), then the only
path to a possible solution would be FontTools from Just van Rossum,
this is a Python-based package that translate .ttf files into text
(source) representation of them, and vice-versa. Using it, you are
free to built a complete font for Devanagari, even it will be quite
a hard job (I use this tool quite a lot to develop a Gurmukhi font, so
yes it is possible; however, I did not restrict myself to OpenSource, as
I am not a saint, so I also used a large number of other tools, most of
them free to use, at least for a non-professional like me.)


And to end the point: to built a "OpenType" font, as opposed to a TrueType
one, one need to sign the font file. And to properly sign a file,
I think you are required to use non-OpenSource software, even if I believe
some versions are available for free for non-commercial use. So to end
on a non-optimistic point, I believe it is impossible to create a
font using only OpenSource softwares.


Antoine