[Sugar-devel] [GSOC] Font Editor Next Steps

[Dave Crossland]

On 21 June 2016 at 22:25, Yash Agarwal <agrwal.ysh94 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Today's work:
> load UFO, save UFO, import binary all are working fine except a few issues
> with MIME types which are now Solved (MIME type? thread on sugar devel list)
> but not added in yet

Great work!

> What I'll do next:
> Add the MIME type solutions

nice!

> use fontmake to export binaries as ufo2ft doesn't convert any cubic bezier
> to quadratic beziers which are used in binary formats

Actually cubic beziers _are_ used in the binary format OpenType in its
"CFF Flavour" - so conversion to TT is not needed.

And not wanted either, I think, since C.F.F. stands for 'Compressed
Font Format' and thus is inherently better for XO-1s with limited disk
space.

ufo2ft can make OpenType CFF binary fonts as well as OpenType TTF binary fonts.

There is a convention that OpenType CFF binaries have a *.otf file
extension; please use it.

> make UI forms for creating a new font

Nice

> handle this issue

That will be great to do this week :)

> Questions:
> what should be the path for saving the ufo/ttf files?  my_activity_root/data?

The UFO files are saved. The OTF files are exported.

UFOs should be saved to the journal. I believe that you use the Sugar
Toolkit API to save files to the journal.

I recommend that OTFs should be exported _and_ activated at the same
moment, and then the "Font Manager" part of the application can
de-activate them if the user wants that.

When a font is activated it is stored in ~/.fonts/ and then fc-cache
is run on that directory to refresh it. It might be necessary for
activities or even the whole sugar desktop to be restarted for them to
make the newly activated font available for use (eg in the Write
activity.)

When a font is deactivated, it should be stored _somewhere_ but there
is no standard location on libre desktops. Perhaps
~/.fonts-deactivated/ will be ok. I'm open to suggestions! :)