New to Typophile? Accounts are free, and easy to set up.
Any interest in Windows tool for editing features?
A few years ago (2008-2009) I started to develop a Windows application to ease the tedium of adding OpenType features to fonts. I had to set it aside then, but I am now working out the kinks and finishing it off. And I wonder if it would be of any interest to fellow typophiles?
It opens an AFM file to get information about the glyphs in a font and then autogenerates classes and features based on glyph naming (and suffixes in particular). It also allows manual creation of features and exports a feature (FEA) file.
If there's interest, I'll package it up and share it. Again, it's a Windows application and requires the .NET Framework.
Download and give it a try: http://www.timrolands.com/More/Downloads.aspx
Tim
User login
Support our Sponsors
5 Apr 2012 — 7:50am
Doesn't VOLT do the same thing?
5 Apr 2012 — 7:59am
{To Follow}
5 Apr 2012 — 8:03am
The interface looks better designed than VOLT, which in my (limited) experience is rather fiddly. I'd certainly be interested to see what this can do.
5 Apr 2012 — 8:15am
I have never used VOLT, so it is quite possible that I am duplicating functionality that already exists. Does VOLT work with both PS and TT flavored OpenType fonts?
5 Apr 2012 — 8:20am
New tools are always worth looking at! Thank you for offering it.
5 Apr 2012 — 9:52am
VOLT converts everything to TrueType, and as I remember, strips out existing features each time it opens a font file.
5 Apr 2012 — 1:37pm
Yes i'm interested.
my email is [my profile name]@gmail.com
thanks.
5 Apr 2012 — 5:05pm
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I just use a text editor. Edit Pad Pro has all the tools, but even the simplest text editor will work.
I have my stock features & classes already set up in a .txt file, plus some single features I can add -- like a feature for precomposed fractions, if I don't feel like making numerators & denominators for a font. Etc.
For extracting info from the .afm, I use "find" & write off smaller files...
6 Apr 2012 — 10:30am
This is totally different from VOLT.
VOLT is a visual editing tool for developing OpenType Layout (including GPOS). It does not use Adobe's feature syntax, but its own visual representation and text formats.
[Bendy, VOLT does not 'convert everything to TrueType'. VOLT's visual interface requires TTF for display of glyphs because the tool does not have a PostScript rasteriser, but it will open and compile CFF fonts. So if making CFF fonts I do my editing in a temporary TTF source, then import the VOLT .vtp project file into my OTF.]
6 Apr 2012 — 11:23am
"If there's interest" - of course. Especially generating classes.
6 Apr 2012 — 11:23am
Hum, that's strange. I'll need to pay more attention in the next VOLT lesson. Last time I used it on a PostScript otf, it converted all my glyphs into TrueType outlines when output. Maybe there's a setting I missed.
6 Apr 2012 — 2:46pm
Maybe my Ovaltine has fermented, but the Glyph Classes listed in your example make absolutely no sense to me...
6 Apr 2012 — 10:10pm
Ben, you must be misremembering: there is no way that VOLT can convert glyphs to TrueType. The only tables it can write are GDEF, GSUB, GPOS and cmap.
9 Apr 2012 — 6:04am
Here's a brief rundown of what the application actually does. It first loads all the glyphs from the AFM file. Then it looks for glyphs with suffixes that match certain features (e.g., all glyphs with .smcp suffixes for small caps). The supported features are currently determined by a text settings file, so as new features come along, they can be added. All of the glyphs with a given suffix are then added to a class named for the suffix with a "1" added. A corresponding class is created containing all the non-suffixed matching glyphs, and this class is also named for the suffix but with a "0" added. 1 and 0 for on and off, respectively. Substitution rules are generated using these classes (e.g., sub @smcp0 by @smcp1). For ligatures, glyphs with underscores in the names are used to generate those rules (e.g., sub c t by c_t). Other features are currently a bit more hard coded, like fractions. Hope that helps.
Tim
9 Apr 2012 — 6:07am
I am working on an update to my website, and I will go ahead and get this application out there for download on the site. Probably around mid-week. Then people can play around with it.
Tim
21 May 2012 — 12:07pm
The new website isn't quite ready for launch, but I went ahead and posted my "OpenType Features Editor" tool anyway. Here is the link:
http://www.timrolands.com/More/Downloads.aspx
Please bear in mind that this is very much a beta release, and it is released as-is with no warranty whatsoever. Try it out and let me know what you think. I would like to make a tool that is truly useful for other font developers out there and give something back to the community here.
Edit: Just added a quick-and-dirty User Guide as well.
Tim
11 Apr 2012 — 12:25pm
Anybody following this thread familiar with DTL FontMaster? Does it include functionality to automatically generate OpenType features? I ask because of this post (http://typophile.com/node/42009#comment-258480), which makes it sound like perhaps it does.
Tim
11 Apr 2012 — 1:05pm
Tim: ‘Anybody following this thread familiar with DTL FontMaster’
Yes, I am ;-) (Quoting myself from this topic): DTL BezierMaster, DataMaster, and IkarusMaster contain the modified URW++ version of Adobe’s Hatch Open Type (HOT) tool [since 2002], which is also part of OTM [since 2009]. This means that the character set does not have to match the characters listed in the [‘all’ covering, like this one] OpenType Layout features file, because all features that are not covered by the character set will be removed automatically during compiling [this can be done in batch with DM].
FEB
16 Apr 2012 — 11:23am
It looks like there have been 16 downloads of the application. Has anyone had a chance to try it out? Any suggestions? I'm especially interested in improving the OpenType code that is generated.
Tim
16 Apr 2012 — 8:33pm
Once I have the time, (this weekend, most likely), I plan on trying this out as I'm more than happy to support anyone developing anything (type-design related), for Windows.
17 Apr 2012 — 6:24am
Thanks, James.
21 May 2012 — 12:10pm
It has been a few weeks now, and the address to access the download has changed:
http://www.timrolands.com/More/Downloads.aspx
Has anyone out there had a chance to use the tool and formulate some opinion or feedback on it?
Tim
29 May 2012 — 12:01am
Tim,
I finally got around to downloading and installing this. I'll play with it a bit more over the course of the week but so far, it seems to be working well.