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feature request: --make ttf/cff/cff2/svg/blahblahblah

See original GitHub issue

Every time I had a dumb or possibly-not-dumb-but-definitely-crazy idea for a font, I reach for TTX with a small font file and then strip down the converted XML to then start hacking on the initial font in XML form… but it would be super great if I didn’t have to find a random small font to strip down, but instead had a way to say something like: ttx --make-ttf or ttx --make cff2 and have it output minimal XML for a stub font with a null and space glyph with a 3/1/0 cmap or something, with a way to indicate whether you need TTF’s loca+glyf, or a CFF/CFF2 block, or an SVG table, or even EBDT and friends?

There could even just be minimal ttf/cff/cff2/svg/ebdt fonts that are used to generate the XML by running “ttx thatfont.otf” under the hood or something. Stub fonts are truly tiny, so including all of them would pack maybe 2kb to the fonttools install?

Anyway, just a thought.

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 5 years ago
Reactions:2
Comments:7 (2 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

2reactions

behdadcommented, Nov 30, 2018

Yes please!!! Now that there’s fontBuilder module, maybe this becomes the command-line interface to that module…

1reaction

justvanrossumcommented, Dec 2, 2018

There are some examples in the source: https://github.com/fonttools/fonttools/blob/master/Lib/fontTools/fontBuilder.py It’s pretty new, and still requires quite some spec knowledge, but it does make it a lot easier to programmatically get a working font.