Ideas For a Sugar Font Editor

2016-04-23

By Dave Crossland (GSoC Mentor)

I don’t have any preconceptions about what a Sugar Activity for drawing and editing fonts should be like. But here’s are a few ideas to get started.

I described some of the Big Ideas of font editors in the Glyphr Studio issue tracker, a web based font editor.

For drawing, I think that a spiro and curve offsetting could be interesting. It can be done with inkscape, and used in Metapolator, FontArk, and LetterInk as discussed recently on type-drawers (the #1 font design forum.)

But this would be a stretch goal; before getting to that point, you’d need to create the most basic font editor possible - drawing with regular PostScript bezier outlines - and get the whole editor working end to end. For that, TruFont is a great model to follow in terms of functionality, and base font data libraries, but since it is PyQt5 based its UI can not be used directly in Sugar.

In fact, making a simple Font Manager activity so that users can select, share (upload + download), install, and use fonts would likely be a big milestone and form a base for a font editor activity to build upon. There are already two similar activities.

Other improvements to the font related parts of the Sugar Platform may also be needed.

Here are some links related to the above:

• Big Ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Idea_(marketing)

Font Editors

• FontForge (C) https://github.com/trufont
• Glyphr (JavaScript) https://github.com/mattlag/Glyphr-Studio
• Metapolator (JavaScript) https://github.com/metapolator
• Prototypo (JavaScript) https://github.com/byte-foundry
• TruFont (Python) https://github.com/trufont
• UI discussion https://github.com/mattlag/Glyphr-Studio/issues/94

Splines

• Spiro Homepage http://raph.levien.com/spiro/
• Spiro PhD Thesis http://raph.levien.com/phd/phd.html
• Spiro in ppedit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ekZJ9h9PXU
• Spiro in JavaScript http://fontly.com/sandbox/spiro.html
• Bezier Primer, stroke offsetting https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/#offsetting
• Inkscape Spiro Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OaLZuFZxdk
• Inkscape Spiro + Powerstroke (offsetting) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy2fxxqEZ-A
• Stroke Based Fonts Discussion http://typedrawers.com/discussion/1463/how-skeleton-based-type-design-could-shake-up-digital-type-design-workflows

Font Managers

• Font Managers Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_management_software
• Google Fonts https://www.google.com/fonts
• FontMatrix http://fontmatrix.be
• GNOME https://fontmanager.github.io

Sugar

• Font Manager binary https://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4669
• Font Manager source https://github.com/godiard/favorite-fonts-activity
• Font technical details https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_Undiscoverable
• Font technical details https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/Font_configuration