FontLab



This book is about using FontLab and FontLab Studio, the Font creation tools from FontLab for both Mac and Windows.

Goals

 * The initial goal was to cover just Python scripting, but this draws on font design and production techniques, so they need a place too.
 * Therefore this book aims to document complete and efficient howto info on all aspects of FontLab usage in production of modern fonts.
 * FontLab supports a large range of features and font formats, so the potential scope of this book is correspondingly large.

Within the Python scripting chapter, the aim is to support two learning paths:
 * 1) To give non-programming font designers a complete and efficient tutorial to get useful scripting work done.
 * 2) To give programmers who are not font designers an efficient tour of the APIs so they can write scripts for a font designer.

"Efficient" covers several points:
 * That all the materials needed are in one place, so the reader doesn't have to trawl for fragmented info (i.e. its done once here for everybody)
 * That the material is presented in the appropriate sequence to achieve a given purpose.(need to collate a list of tutorial examples)
 * Compatibility between versions of FontLab, Python and OS's are given, so a working combination can be assembled in every case.
 * Application configuration (options, modes) necessary for each task are included, either for manual setup or as part of the scripting. FontLab has a large number of options and modes, some of which can affect apparently unrelated tasks or functions, so this is an important area.

Chapters

 * Installation where to get which bits and how to put them together
 * Version history what version released when on which OS
 * Configuration setup files, modes, options, etc.
 * Font specification planning requirements for a font
 * Font creation setting up and creating fonts from scratch
 * /Multiple Masters/ setting up and creating MM Fonts
 * Font editing importing and modifying existing fonts
 * Font generation generating the font as a usable file
 * /Scripting/ Python Scripting