Getting started in RoboFont ↩
A quick introduction to RoboFont.
Hello, and welcome to RoboFont!
This is a quick ‘n easy introduction to get started with RoboFont.
NOTE: It’s possible that you don’t see anything when starting up the application. RoboFont does not automatically open a window when you open it.
Starting a new font
To open a new font, go to your toolbar and click File > New, or press ⌘ + N. An untitled file will open with empty template glyphs.
RoboFont uses .ufo as its native font format. Every source has it’s own file.
To set the family and style name of your font, go to the Font Info window by clicking on the icon with the “i” at the top. The font info for a font named RoboType Regular would look like this:
- Family Name: RoboType
- Style Name: Regular
You can find a more detailed explanation about font naming at Setting font family names.
Drawing a glyph
Double clicking on a glyph in the Font Overview will open a Glyph Editor.
The Glyph Editor has a bunch of tools at the top:
| Icon | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
|
To edit visual glyph data such as contours, anchors, components, guidelines, images, etc |
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To draw Bezier contours |
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To add points to contours or cut them apart |
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To draw measurement lines across glyphs. Measurements include the distance, angle and horizontal / vertical projections between intersection points. |
If you click on the button on the right you get on overview of all your layers. Layers can be handy if you want to try out different designs.
You can start a drawing by clicking and dragging. By clicking you draw an on-curve point, by dragging you can draw it’s off-curve points.
You can find more information about different point types on the Contours page.
For more tips about drawing neat outlines, see Checking contour quality.
Spacing a glyph
It’s very useful to see your glyphs next to each other during drawing or spacingThe process of designing the whitespace in a typeface by adjusting the left and right side-bearings of each glyph., that’s why there is a specific Space Center.
You can change your spacing directly with the boxes at the bottom or with the handle bars next to the glyps, and check how your letters behave next to each other.
Open Space Center either through Window > Space Center, or directly from the font window.
Check out this page for a detailed introduction of the spacing process: Introduction to spacing.
Writing features
Sometimes you want to make your font do special things, like substitute a glyph when a certain combination occurs, or add some language-specific alternates. These are called OpenType features, and you can write them in the Features editor.
This is a small example to substitute f and i by a fi ligature in a font:
feature liga {
sub f i by fi;
} liga;
And another example, if you have alternates for a glyph:
feature alt {
sub a from [a.alt a.alt2];
} alt;
But of course there are many more things you can do with features. Tal Leming, who developed OpenType features, wrote a great introduction: the OpenType Cookbook.
Using scripts and extensions
As you can see, RoboFont is a very down-to-earth glyph editor. It starts from the principle that you are in control of what your own tools look like. That means that you can personalize it almost completely as you like, by adding extensions and writing scripts.
Extensions
There are a lot of extensions available that you can install through the Mechanic extension. Don’t see Mechanic in your extension tab yet? You can download it through the Mechanic webite.
One very useful extension to install is the Shape Tool, this tool allows you to draw circles and rectangles in the Glyph Editor.
You might ask why a shape tool is not automatically included in RoboFont. RoboFont does not want to assume that everyone draws shapes the same way, giving you the freedom to draw shapes exactly how you want them. Read the RoboFont design principles for more about this.
Some more recommended extensions include:
- Batch — To generate fonts in various formats
- DesignspaceEditor — To create and edit .designspace documents, necessary for making variable fonts
- GlyphBrowser — For browsing and selecting unicode values, glyphNames et cetera
Scripts
Making typefaces is a long process with many repetitive tasks, and sometimes the extension that does exactly what you want doesn’t exist… That’s where writing your own python scripts can come in really handy.
For a beginner’s introduction to making your own scripts, go to Coding in RoboFont.
Or check out the RoboFont Script Database! This website contains many publicly available RoboFont scripts to help you in the design process.