A quick introduction to RoboFont.

beginner

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 RoboFont.

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 to draw your glyphs:

Icon	Name	Description
	Edit Tool	To edit visual glyph data such as contours, anchors, components, guidelines, images, etc
	Draw Tool	To draw Bezier contours
	Slice Tool	To add points to contours or cut them apart
	Measurement Tool	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.

All the dots on the curves are called on-curve points, all the dots that are not of the curve are called off-curve points.

You can find more information about different point types on the Contours page. For more tips about good drawing practices see: Checking contour quality.

Spacing a glyph

It’s very useful to see your glyphs next to each other during drawing or spacing, that’s why there is a special Space Center. Here you can change your spacing directly with the boxes at the bottom, 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;

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 handy extension to install is the Shape Tool, this one allows you to draw circles and rectangles in the Glyph Editor.