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Utility for building static cuts of variable fonts

License: MIT License

Python 89.60% Roff 10.40%

fonts fonttools variable-fonts

vfit's Introduction

About

VFIT (Variable Font Instancing Tool) allows you to generate custom, static instances of a variable font defined in a configuration file.

Installation

VFIT is now available on the Python Package Index. You can install VFIT with the following command:

$ pip3 install vfit

Alternatively, you can install VFIT by downloading a pre-built wheel from the Releases section or by building it yourself.

# Skip this step if you're downloading a prebuilt wheel.
$ git clone https://github.com/jonpalmisc/vfit.git && cd vfit
$ poetry build && cd dist

# Install VFIT from the wheel.
$ pip install vfit-version-py3-none-any.whl

Usage

To begin, you will need a variable font file to work with. Your first step will be creating a configuration file. See sample.json for an example.

Next, run VFIT and pass your configuration and variable font file as arguments:

$ vfit config.json variable.ttf

If you would like to generate instances into a specific directory, you can use the -o option. For more options, see vfit --help.

Contributing

All contributions are welcome. If you find a bug or have a request for a feature, feel free to create a new issue (or even better, a pull request).

If you are submitting a pull request, please format your code with yapf using the default settings. Additionally, I am aware that camelCase naming is against the convention for Python, but it is the convention used by fonttools, so I have chosen to use it here as well for consistency.

Credits

Special thanks to Viktor Rubenko, who knows way more about font technology than I do and has been incredibly helpful in fixing strange bugs.

The VFIT logo uses NewGlyph's Armada variable font.

License

VFIT is available under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for more information.

vfit's People

Contributors

Stargazers

Watchers

Forkers

viktorrubenko compilezero sjoerdmouissie alexmyczko hirajanwin zorfling

vfit's Issues

Where are the binaries added when installing via pip3?

Hi! The command vfit was not found and, in turn, I could not find the path I should add to $PATH via my .zshrc file.

Subfamilies are not generated correctly for Windows

The way that subfamilies are currently handled does not seem to work on Windows. On macOS, subfamilies such as condensed/extended variants can be grouped together under one main family, but on Windows, this breaks catastrophically. I'm not exactly sure how to fix this yet - I need to go over the OpenType specification some more.

ValueError: Missing required table fvar

Sorry to bring this up if the project is defunct (or I'm missing some obvious step), I keep getting this error trying to generate a set of static font family files:

$ vfit -o ./output-folder -f woff2 sample.json font.otf
Traceback (most recent call last):                                                                            
  File "/home/jonathan/.local/bin/vfit", line 8, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/home/jonathan/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/vfit/app.py", line 65, in main
    core.generateInstances(cfg, args)
  File "/home/jonathan/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/vfit/core.py", line 21, in generateInstances
    instantiateFont(font, style["axes"], inplace=True, overlap=True)
  File "/home/jonathan/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/fontTools/varLib/instancer/__init__.py", line 1196, in instantiateVariableFont
    sanityCheckVariableTables(varfont)
  File "/home/jonathan/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/fontTools/varLib/instancer/__init__.py", line 1126, in sanityCheckVariableTables
    raise ValueError("Missing required table fvar")
ValueError: Missing required table fvar

not getting the results i'd like to

i have tried your sample.json on these fonts:

https://sid.ethz.ch/debian/fonts-homecomputer/fonts-homecomputer-1.0/temp_out/

but i'd rather like to get results like
https://sid.ethz.ch/debian/fonts-homecomputer/fonts-homecomputer-1.0/demo-workbench.html

it's pretty near, but i'm not sure... maybe you have a trick/tip how to improve the sample.json?

Some paths intersect incorrectly

Sometimes paths intersect incorrectly in the static output. I'm not sure what causes this but it appears to be caused by the instancing process.

This issue only appears on Mac as far as I can tell!

Some name table properties are non-modifiable or hardcoded

Currently, there is limited support for customizing the name table, and the version field is hardcoded to "Version 1.000". Ideally, users would be able to set additional name table entries such as the copyright string or manufacturer URL.

Produced font files are not recognized as valid on Windows

I noticed recently that fonts produced by VFIT do not work on Windows, with the following error message being produced:

I am currently investigating the issue. If you are aware of a fix or workaround, please share.

Add version flag

There should be a way to easily print the program version like in many other CLI tools.

Do not override other values in name table

Whould be nice to skip other values, existing in font name table and modify only mentioned in config.json

Add ability to permanently change letter tracking/spacing

Some fonts look better when the space between letters is increased or decreased. Chang this manually in software such as Photoshop is tedious, and some software like Word or Excel makes it very difficult to make these changes. It would be nice to be able to modify tracking before generating static cuts.

For example, so I can make the font have the spacing shown on the bottom as default: