fontmake has a majority market share

[simoncozens]

What stops fonticulus for being ready for prime-time?

Meta-development

• Document build strategy / code flow so that it's understandable to others
• Document all methods

Source loading (babelfont-rs)

• Load UFO/designspace
• Load Glyphs 3 (not features yet)
• Load Glyphs 2
• Load FontLab VFJ

Static-font metadata tables

• head
  • macStyle
  • flags
• post
• cmap
  • cmap 4
  • cmap 12
  • cmap 14
• hhea
• OS/2
  • fsType
  • Unicode ranges (draft PR)
  • sFamilyClass
• name (done, needs checking)
• maxp
• hmtx
• loca
• Vertical tables (vhea/vmtx)

Outlines

• Decompose mixed glyphs
• Convert cubic to quadratic
• Remove overlaps on static build (use separate ttf-remove-overlap utility)
• Remove implied oncurves (currently buggy, needs to be done in an interpolation-compatible way)

Variable fonts

• Generate gvar deltas
• Generate fvar table
• Generate avar table
• Generate HVAR/MVAR/VVAR metadata tables (could be done via separate utility?)
• Generate STAT table (needs fonttools-rs support)
• Optimize gvar deltas (use separate ttf-optimize-gvar utility)

OpenType layout generation

• Parse the feature file
• Generate binary layout tables (in progress)
  • Build basic tables with script table, feature table, lookup table
  • GSUB1
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GSUB2
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GSUB3
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GSUB4
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GSUB5
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GSUB6
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GSUB8
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GPOS1
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GPOS2
    • fonttools-rs (Format 1 done, format 2 needed)
    • feaparser
  • GPOS3
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GPOS4
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GPOS5
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GPOS6
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GPOS7
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • GPOS8
    • fonttools-rs
    • feaparser
  • Build GDEF (needs fonttools-rs support)
  • Build GDEF variation store (needs fonttools-rs support)
• Generate implicit features from source (what ufo2ft calls "feature writers")
  • Kern
    • Basic implementation
    • No, not just a rigged demo, a proper implementation with script-appropriate kern/dist and LTR/RTL support
    • Generate optimal class-based pair positioning in fonttools-rs
  • Mark/mkmk
• Overflow handling

Verification and testing

• Develop regression test suite which placates the easily-scared
• Ensure regression test suite passes

[cmyr]

Great, thanks simon.

I'm very happy to help out on this in any number of ways, both in the more busy-work stuff of cleanup/documentation, but I'm also happy to dig into the implementation details for missing tables etcetera; I think this would be helpful for me anyway as an opportunity to fill in some gaps in my knowledge.

[simoncozens]

Thanks! For some of the missing tables stuff, the basic rule is "do whatever ufo2ft does".

[yisibl]

Hi @simoncozens

This is an exciting project.

Are there any plans to support COLR/COLR and SVG tables? Chrome is going to release[1] support for COLRv1, and I hope to improve the speed of COLR font generation through Rust, so that more users can use the latest COLRv1 fonts through our platform.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/kDfj3rcA6sc/m/mXFBFc5bBQAJ

[simoncozens]

I think eventually there will be COLR/SVG support, but not for a while yet. I'm going to focus on the 90% use case and get that right first.