FontDesignToolkit

Revision 5 as of 2006-06-20 23:21:44

Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/font-design-toolkit
Created: by NicolasSpalinger
Contributors:
Packages affected:

Summary

Making Ubuntu the ideal environment to design free/libre/open fonts

Rationale

The vast majority of font designers use OSX. With common standards emerging (opentype) more are thinking cross-platform and most are using some free/libre/open plugins along with the current proprietary stack of font design tools. Improving the tools, integrating them and providing a rich and intuitive design environment similar to what the font design community is accustomed to will help.

Use cases

Scope

We will list available

tools
research papers
tutorials
font sources to contribute to
font sources to branch from

And gather useful information about the font design community

FLOSS-friendly designers
FLOSS-friendly websites and forums
font design community real-life meetups (conference and workshops)

Design

Creating a meta-package to get the font design toolkit easily installed.

Implementation

Integrating the following tools:

fontforge, fontforge-doc, inkscape, gimp
freetype-tools, libfont-ttf-perl, fonttools, gwaterfall, freetype-demos, oto, sfddiff, fontQA, ttx, robofab, superpolator
gfontsampler, gucharmap, guci, scribus-font-preview

Doing an UI review for fontforge, suggesting usability enhancements. Helping with the GTK+ port, looking at a common format with FontLab either though import/export filters or a common XML-based format like UFO.

Ubuntu Wiki