FontLab
This book is about using FontLab and FontLab Studio, the Font creation tools from FontLab for both Mac and Windows.
FontLab
An application guide.
Goals
edit- The initial goal was to cover just Python scripting, but this draws on font design and production techniques, so they need a place too.
- Therefore this book aims to document complete and efficient howto info on all aspects of FontLab usage in production of modern fonts.
- FontLab supports a large range of features and font formats, so the potential scope of this book is correspondingly large.
Within the Python scripting chapter, the aim is to support two learning paths:
- To give non-programming font designers a complete and efficient tutorial to get useful scripting work done.
- To give programmers who are not font designers an efficient tour of the APIs so they can write scripts for a font designer.
"Efficient" covers several points:
- That all the materials needed are in one place, so the reader doesn't have to trawl for fragmented info (i.e. its done once here for everybody)
- That the material is presented in the appropriate sequence to achieve a given purpose.(need to collate a list of tutorial examples)
- Compatibility between versions of FontLab, Python and OS's are given, so a working combination can be assembled in every case.
- Application configuration (options, modes) necessary for each task are included, either for manual setup or as part of the scripting. FontLab has a large number of options and modes, some of which can affect apparently unrelated tasks or functions, so this is an important area.
Chapters
edit- Installation where to get which bits and how to put them together
- Version history what version released when on which OS
- Configuration setup files, modes, options, etc.
- Font specification planning requirements for a font
- Font creation setting up and creating fonts from scratch
- Multiple Masters setting up and creating MM Fonts
- Font editing importing and modifying existing fonts
- Font generation generating the font as a usable file
- Scripting Python Scripting
Further reading
edit- Python programming language
- FontLab Python API
- FontLab Forum
- Cascading Style Sheets/Fonts and Text
- Typography/Fonts
- LaTeX/Fonts
- Basic Book Design/Font
- Guide to X11/Fonts
- Using GNOME/Font
- Programming for Palm OS/Small fonts has close to the smallest possible font
- PostScript FAQ describes an even more widely-used font-oriented programming language