fontforge-stubs 2025.11.28

Type stubs for FontForge's Python modules

fontforge-stubs

This package provides PEP 561 type stubs and docstrings for FontForge's Python modules:

• fontforge
• psMat

The stubs and docstrings were created by referencing the official FontForge Python Module documentation and -- when necessary -- the FontForge Python extension source code.

Motivation

FontForge provides powerful Python C extension modules. By nature, they do not contain typing information. Combined with inconsistent naming conventions and at times ambiguous documentation, FontForge Python scripting is unnecessarily arduous.

Perhaps you can relate to:

• Never remembering if it's glyph.name, glyph.glyphName, or glyph.glyph_name
• Reading the docs and still not knowing whether width is an int or a float
• Parsing and re-parsing the documentation to figure out the structure of a feature-script-lang tuple

With type stubs, editors can provide autocompletion, and type checkers can identify errors previously only discovered when running your script with FontForge. Built-in documentation removes the need to constantly switch between your editor and external documentation -- further increasing productivity.

Installation

Install the package in your development environment:

pip install fontforge-stubs

Your editor/type-checker should automatically pick up the stubs.

Versioning and Compatibility

This project uses YYYY.MM.DD calendar versioning.

It aims to be compatible with FontForge 20230101 and later. Legacy and deprecated FontForge Python APIs are not officially supported.

Updates to the FontForge Python APIs since the latest offical release (currently 20251009) are kept in the fontforge-next branch until the next upstream release. If you are using a newer build, you may want to install from fontforge-next:

pip install git+https://github.com/chanicpanic/fontforge-stubs@fontforge-next

Contributing

If you find any issues with the type stubs, please open an issue and/or pull request.

License

This project is under the MIT License.

The stubs and docstrings in this project were closely derived from the FontForge source. In particular, fontforge.rst, psMat.rst, and python.c. See NOTICE.