Font Production Project Template (for UFO/Designspace)

Replace this Readme with info about your project!

Note: This is for a UFO3/Designspace project

Commands

Starting a local development environment

Open this project in your terminal and use the following 3 commands:

Use Python3 to start a new virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .venv

... Activate that environment:

source .venv/bin/activate

... Install the requirements of the project in the virtual environment:

pip install -r requirements.txt

... And finally, if any of the below build commands don't work, you might have left the virtual environment. You just need to re-activate it:

source .venv/bin/activate

Adding an alias (optional)

It might be useful to make a handy "alias" for the top two commands, since you will by typing them all the time.

First, check which "shell" you are using; newer macs use zsh, older macs use bash. Run this command to check:

echo $SHELL

... if it says /bin/zsh then you're using zsh; if it says /bin/bash, then you're using bash.

Then, paste this command to alias the first two commands above to just venv. Replace ~/.zshrc with ~/.bashrc if you are using bash.

echo 'alias venv="python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate"' >> ~/.zshrc

... then restart the terminal.

From now on you only need to type venv to start a virtual environment, or activate one if it already exists.

Building and testing fonts

To build OTFs, TTFs, Variable Fonts, and WOFFs from .designspace files in A Sources, use the following command, or drag the file in to your Terminal:

./build.sh

... or you can generate things individually:

./build-otfs.sh
./build-ttfs.sh
./build-vfttfs.sh
./build-woffs.sh
./build-vfwoffs.sh

To use fontbakery to check the OTFs and TTFs in B Builds, use either of these commands:

./build-test.sh

This will generate an HTML output in D Proofs.

Freezing the development environment

To “Freeze” all the dependencies in the python environment, run this command:

pip freeze > requirements-freeze.txt

This make a new requirements-freeze.txt with the packages pip has installed and their exact version numbers. This will ensure that the next time you initialize your project and run pip install -r requirements-freeze.txt, all the dependencies will be exactly the same as they are now.

License

Uses MIT license. Demo fonts are Mutator Sans, by Erik van Blokland, also licensed under MIT (or BSD?).