Ubuntu Wiki

• 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.

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

discussion of related specs: OpenFonts FontManagement

CategorySpec