Description:

Designing beautiful Fonts is a time consuming task. How about automating non design tasks like adding rules, running tests etc, So that we can just concentrate on the design. Understanding and adding rules it takes a lot of time than design for Indic fonts. In this talk, we will discuss about the basics of Fonts, design work flow and Automation with Python.

Open source Font design tools are not very usable compared to the tools available in Mac like Glyphs. Designers prefer to design type face using vector tools like Inkscape. Svgs exported from Inkscape like tools can be imported as outline images using Python fontforge bindings.

Font rules can be defined outside the fonts using featurefiles. Using Python fontforge we can merge these rules into the font.

Python libraries used:

• Python fontforge bindings
• unittest
• svgwrite

Prerequisites:

Basic knowledge about Fonts and Python.

Content URLs:

Slides and illustrations are in progress. I will update the slides before the talk. Sharing the link with the outline of what I am planing to cover.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0VWJyt9zNkRMy1qbFJ3SkpiM2c/view?usp=sharing

Speaker Info:

I work at Red Hat India Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore. GlusterFS( http://www.gluster.org/ ) contributor.

I do Font design occasionally and maintain two Kannada Fonts. I use Python both at work and for personal projects. (You will find many projects in github https://github.com/aravindavk )

Speaker Links:

http://aravindavk.in

https://github.com/aravindavk

https://twitter.com/aravindavk