"font engineering" checklist for small foundries?

Glyphs
1

Hey all. In design school, they only covered “font engineering” by saying “someone will do that for you.” I’ve seen a couple of talks on YouTube, and I have two takeaways:

  • ask someone who already knows
  • maybe Glyphs does a lot of this already?

I’m getting ready to publish my first project for other people to use, but I don’t know what kind of “font engineering” I need to do before it’s ready. Does anyone have a recommended process for small/indie foundries who use Glyphs? I’m sure I’ll develop my own process over time, but I’d love a starting point.

2

There are many scripts that help you find problems. That’s what I as a font engineer rely on.

mekkablue scripts:
Component Problem Finder
Path Problem Finder
Kink Finder
Find Near Vertical Misses

Run those, that will already give you a lot to work through. Then run your exported fonts through Fontspector (or Fontbakery, if you prefer much slower, but more complete checks). Look up what the highlighted issues mean and fix them in your Glyphs file.

Otherwise, learn Python scripting. That will allow you to automate an immense amount of checking and fixing things.

Here’s my personal (very approximate, and definitely incomplete) list of things I would do on a project. Bear in mind that this depends heavily on the project type, the client, budget, style, application intention and many other factors:

  • design review (accent design, localisation…)
  • resolve mixed paths/components
  • resolve unaligned/misaligned/transformed components
  • character set review
  • fix everything necessary from Path Problem Finder
  • anchor position checks
  • kerning consistency checks (groups, “orphaned” kerning, missing kerning)
  • roman/italic consistency checks
  • interpolation checks (export as VF and run through Fontspector)
  • metadata checks (instances, style linking, naming)
  • hinting setup (autohint, usually)

And a ton of other things that just come up while working on the file. Most of this is automated with Python scripts, often written on a per-project basis.

I would of course recommend outsourcing this stuff to a font engineer, unless you want to invest a lot of time in learning all this boring stuff, instead of focusing on the design part. More eyes always see more.

1 Like
3

Hey, thanks for this. I spent some time with Fontbakery today, and I’ll dig into some of these other checks as well.

4

I sincerely recommend Fontspector. More or less the same interface, but 1000× as fast (because written in Rust, not Python). It’s the successor of Fontbakery, built by the same team. It’s just not quite as complete and stable as Fontbakery yet.