FontLab

An application guide.

This book is about using FontLab and FontLab Studio, the Font creation tools from FontLab for both Mac and Windows.

Goals[edit | edit source]

The initial goal was to cover just Python scripting, but this draws on font design and production techniques, so they need a place too.
Therefore this book aims to document complete and efficient howto info on all aspects of FontLab usage in production of modern fonts.
FontLab supports a large range of features and font formats, so the potential scope of this book is correspondingly large.

Within the Python scripting chapter, the aim is to support two learning paths:

To give non-programming font designers a complete and efficient tutorial to get useful scripting work done.
To give programmers who are not font designers an efficient tour of the APIs so they can write scripts for a font designer.

"Efficient" covers several points:

That all the materials needed are in one place, so the reader doesn't have to trawl for fragmented info (i.e. its done once here for everybody)
That the material is presented in the appropriate sequence to achieve a given purpose.(need to collate a list of tutorial examples)
Compatibility between versions of FontLab, Python and OS's are given, so a working combination can be assembled in every case.
Application configuration (options, modes) necessary for each task are included, either for manual setup or as part of the scripting. FontLab has a large number of options and modes, some of which can affect apparently unrelated tasks or functions, so this is an important area.