Font Development
I haven’t looked at the code at all, but I wonder how much effort it would take to polish off fontforge, give it a pretty face, and build up the community around that gem?
How many people out there use fontforge?
I talked to Raph Levien at LWE in SF and he mentioned and showed me a tool he is working on for his PhD which does brilliant font development. He spoke about making this code available for a project like Inkscape to integrate.
I’ve used pfaedit/fontforge for the bullets and points font for OOo and started on a custom sans serif font. While the custom toolkit is pretty hideous, the application itself is insanely cool. The amount of work in that thing is just incredible for pretty much a one-man project.
Comment by Jakub Steiner — November 8, 2005 @ 3:47 pm
I use Fontforge to finish a chinese stylized font:
http://www.lrn.ru/~avp/shots/chinese.png
Comment by Alexandre Prokoudine — November 8, 2005 @ 7:01 pm
I used for fixing some ms font, and some vector font too.
My normal job was always to include bitmap fonts in the vector font, for good looking on the screen.
So finally the product was bitmap embedded truetype font.
However I would like to produce bitmap embedded cubic bezier capable unicode font. Is there a format available for this?
Postscript fonts are not unicode and cant bitmap embedded (as far as I know).
Truetype font use quadratic bezier, which is not high quality.
All the other formats below this capability …
Is there possible embedded bitmap in a svg font file? (is there any application, which is capable to handle svg fonts?) Is the hinting supported in svg fonts?
I think there is a definite need for a standard and free font format …
Best regards,
Khiraly
Comment by Khiraly — November 9, 2005 @ 4:29 pm
I’ve been using fontforge/pfaedit since way back when. Almost exclusively to convert and regenerate outlines from one container format to the next ttfpsotf. It’s really faburiffic. Considered porting it to Gtk and even Motif at one point, but then lost interest in that particular project.
Comment by Avi Bercovich — November 12, 2005 @ 12:09 pm
Thanks for all the posts. I see there is much interest in font development and creation.
I have been researching the legality of fonts at Creative Commons as well.
I will write more about these things in the future.
It would be great to get fontforge all polished with a nice new interface.
Comment by jon — November 16, 2005 @ 4:23 am