UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa9' (copyright field)

Hey folks,

I’ve been using fontmake on https://github.com/weiweihuanghuang/Work-Sans. This font uses a copyright symbol in the copyright field.

‘Copyright © 2015 by Wei Huang. All rights reserved.’

Fontmake didn’t like this. The traceback points to glyphsLib/builder.py", line 214, in generate_base_fonts

    if copyright:
        ufo.info.copyright = unicode(copyright.decode("utf-8"))

If I remove the copyright symbol, it will successfully convert the .glyphs into ufos.

I have the following dependencies installed:

python 2.7
defcon==0.1
fonttools==3.0
glyphsLib==1.0
robofab==1.2
wheel==0.24.0

If my dependencies are ok and I’m not doing something stupid, I’ll happily fix this. I’m guessing it could be the classic 2.7 encode/decode problem.

Regards, Marc

[m4rc1e]

Thank you Cosimo!

[anthrotype]

Ok, the issue is because since #60 glyphsLib parser is decoding the input data using UTF-8 encoding so the parsed data is already unicode strings. That line in builder.py was still attempting to call decode on a unicode string, which on Python 3 is illegal, whereas on Python2 it encodes with default encoding (‘ascii’) before decoding with the specified encoding. That’s why it fails with UnicodeEncodeError when attempting to decode… I’ll send a patch.