RoboFab is dead

[Ben Kiel]

All:

An official announcement that we are from this point forward discontinuing development of RoboFab. There are many reasons for this, the main ones being:

1. Making RoboFab work with UFO3 exposed the mess of code that had built up over 15 years
2. RoboFab was rather tied to one application. It worked in others, but something more portable and generic would be better
3. A lot of cruft and application specific code had built up over the years

One can find more about this in my slides from Robothon: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5qi00qpynptgsjh/fontparts_robothon_18.pdf?dl=0

We have been first experimenting and finally deciding to build out fontParts as the replacement for RoboFab. You can find the code here:

http://github.com/robofab-developers/fontParts

And the documentation here:

http://fontparts.readthedocs.io

Right now we are working to get fontParts to an initial 1.0 release, but the codebase is fairly complete, stable, and is currently what is in RoboFont3.

We may turn this group into an archive in a few months, so that the data stays around.

Look for a announcement soon on where we are going to put discussion (outside of gitHub tickets) for fontParts.

Best,

Ben