UFO support in the FDK

[rrob...@adobe.com]

The latest AFDKO downloads at:

  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/eula.html

now contains some support for T1 hints in UFO  and UFO work flow. This is still experimental work. The tools are being used by the Adobe Type department, but have only been tested with four families, and only minimally under Windows. If any one is interested in trying this out, I would appreciate comments and bug reports.

I am posting on this notice here as an FYI for people interested in developing tools for the UFO font format - I will carry out any further discussion of the FDK support on the Google group https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/uafdkoml, unless it is a spec-specific issue.

Summary:

autohint, checkOutlines, makeotf and tx now all support UFO font files. The following  commands now all work.

checkOutlines font.ufo

autohint font.ufo

tx -t1 font.ufo font.pfa

tx -ufo font.pfa font.ufo

tx -ufo font.otf font.ufo

tx -dump -6 -g A-C font.ufo

makeotf -f <path to ufo font file>

makeotf 

# when a 'font.ufo' file is in the current directory, makeotf

now prefers font.ufo over the otehr default font names, font,txt and font.pfa.

These commands will not work on all ufo fonts: the FDK tools require a

fontinfo.plist file, and that the fontinfo.plist files contain at least an entry for the PostScript FontName.

When autohint and checkOutlines are run on a ufo font, the new GLIF files

are written to an Adobe specific layer,

"glyphs.com.adobe.type.processedGlyphs", NOT to the default "glyphs" layer.

This way, the source data does not get overwritten. 'tx' is aware of this,

and will get the glyph from the right place. If the GLIF file is not in the processed layer, 'tx' gets it from the default layer. 'tx' also has a new option '-altLayer', which specifies which layer 'tx' should prefer. Set this to "-altLayer None"  to force 'tx' to get glyph data only from the default layer.

In checkOutlines and autohint, the option "-o <new file path>"  is not supported for UFO fonts.

The autohint and checkOutlines programs now support a history mechanism for

UFO fonts, such that if you have hinted the font once and then run autohint

again, it will skip the glyphs which have been processed. This mechanism

will notice if the source glyph data has been edited since the last

autohint run, or if checkOutlines has been run and changed the data. (the history data is not generated or used if checkOutlines is used to

just report on issues). For SourceSans-Regular, autohint takes about 70

seconds on my system for the first run, 1 second for the second. The

rationale and method is described in the header of a new file,

FDK/Tools/Shared/FDKScripts/ufoTools.py

There is a new script in the FDKScripts directory, that must be explicitly run with Python:

  AFDKOPython FDK/Tools/Shared/FDKScripts/checkUFOProcessedLayer.py < path to

ufo font>

This script will report any GLIF files in the processed layer that are

out of date with respect to the GLIFS in the default layer, and will

delete any files that are not referenced the history hash map file.

'makeotf' uses this to make sure that that any autohinting or overlap

removal is up to date.

[Ben Kiel]

Folks,

The https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/uafdkoml allows anyone to join, people who sign up just need to be added by a moderator — this is done to avoid spam. If this is a burden, I'll turn that off.

Best,
Ben