On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 09:32:48AM +0200, Ben Laenen wrote: > On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 3:53 AM, Peter Baker <[email protected]> wrote: > > Couple of quick points. First, the FontForge format has always been > > plain text. It works well with CVS, SVN, etc. > > Only if you cut out the unneeded bits like we do with DejaVu. If we > would forget to run that script and commit a change to SVN we'd get > something like a 2 MB patch.
Not my experience, I do post-edit the file before committing, but it is usually few cosmetics, nothing big, the last time I used the dejavu scripts they broke my files, my be I did something wrong, but this was a while ago and I didn't check again since then. > Anyway, FontForge's normalized SFD format is by far the best we've got > for collaborative font development. > > > It isn't really > > human-editable, but it contain everything--outlines, hints or > > instructions, OT features, kerning, etc. Second, UFO by contrast is > > woefully incomplete: it knows nothing about TrueType instructions, for > > example, or OpenType features. The slowness of its development is > > baffling to me, considering the importance of the things that are > > still missing. I flirted with it for a while but had to give it up. > > I should have read further down this thread before complaining on UFO myself > :-) Indeed, UFO is anything but a good exchange format, FF's font dir might be much more reliable. > > Strangely, the binary font formats remain very good for exchange. Both > > the major editors read them! > > You'd still lose a lot of metadata though, like OpenType rule names > for which there's no room in the ttf file. And it's absolutely not > suited for collaboration. Compared to UFO, it is much better, especially if you can't use FF for some reason. Adobe feature files can be considered too. -- Khaled Hosny Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team Free font developer
