Take UFO font sources and generate OTF’s and webfonts
Project description
Ufo2otf is a command line utility that takes UFO font sources and generates OTF’s and webfonts.
Summary
usage: ufo2otf [-h] [--webfonts] [--afdko] [--diagnostics]
infiles [infiles ...]
positional arguments:
infiles The source UFO files
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--webfonts Generate webfonts in a ./webfonts subfolder
--afdko Generate the OTF with Adobe Font Development Kit for Opentype
--diagnostics Display information about available font compilers (no files
outputted)
Usage examples
$ ufo2otf OpenBodoni.ufo
will create a file called OpenBodoni.otf.
$ ufo2otf OpenBodoni-Regular.ufo OpenBodoni-Italic.ufo OpenBodoni-Bold.ufo
will create OpenBodoni-Regalur.otf, OpenBodoni-Italic.otf and OpenBodoni-Bold.otf.
Fontforge
By default, ufo2otf uses FontForge to generate the otf files. FontForge is a free and open source font editor that comes with a python extension. The python extension has access to the functionality of FontForge without needing to launch the graphical program itself.
Ufo2otf will warn you if FontForge is not present. Installing it can be as easy as:
debian, ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install fontforge python-fontforge
os x:
$ brew install fontforge
More info see: http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/How_to_install_FontForge
AFDKO
Ufo2otf can also use the AFDKO to generate the fontfiles.
The Adobe Font Development Kit for Opentype are a set of tools made available by Adobe that can help you generate Opentype/CFF fonts from PostScript sources, and to add OpenType features in the progress.
Since the AFDKO is not open source, and not installable on Linux, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Open Source projects. But it can be useful to have around, if only to compare the output to that of FontForge.
Please check http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko.html for installation instructions. Subsequently, one needs to install Tal Leming’s ufo2afdko package which in turn depends on Robofab:
Webfonts
Passing the option --webfonts will generate a subfolder called webfonts. Ufo2otf autohints the font and proceeds to generate ttf, eot and woff files.
When using the AFDKO to convert the fonts the webfonts option is not available.
CSS
When using the --webfonts option, Ufo2otf will attempt to generate a CSS file to use with the generated webfonts, inspired by the service provided by the website Font Squirrel. However, where Font Squirrel will create a separate css @font-face family for each font style, Ufo2otf will try to construct your font declarations in such a way that one @font-face family can be used with multiple font-styles.
In doing so the script is bound by what CSS supports. Currently, Ufo2otf can distinguish between multiple font-weights and between regular and Italic fonts. If you have other styles to distinguish (condensed, outline etcetera) you will need to adjust the font-family property in the CSS to create separate families.
UFO
UFO is an open and exchangable format for fonts.It is easy to write programs that process UFO fonts, and they play well with versioning systems like Git.
History
Ufo2otf has been developed by Eric Schrijver for the Open Baskerville font project, a collaborative open source typeface.
License
Ufo2otf is licensed under the BSD license (see LICENSE.txt).
Argparse
This software includes a version of Python 2.7’s argparse module that is compatible with earlier version of Python. The author is Steven Bethard and the license is the Python Software Foundation license http://docs.python.org/license.html
