Coding in RoboFont ↩

• 1. Opening a scripting window
• 2. Getting the current font
• 3. Getting the current glyph
• RECAP: Example script
  • 3. Looping over glyphs in a font

Making typefaces is a long process with many repetitive tasks. That’s where coding can come in handy! You don’t need to be a master coder to make scripts that can help you. Here is a quick introduction to get you started with your own scripting projects.

RoboFont is build on python. Any italicised words on this page refer to general python terms. We won’t be discussing those here (since that would make this quick intro a whole less quicker), but you can find a lot of documentation on these python concepts online.

1. Opening a scripting window

Start with opening a Scripting Window (under the Python tab > Scripting Window, or through the shortcut ⌥ + ⌘ + r). This is the place where we are gonna write our code.

Type this at the top of the window and click Run. You should now see Hello world printed at the bottom!

print('Hello world')

Hello world

The top part is reserved for typing your code, and the bottom part will show you any output of the script.

This print function is a very handy one to print out all sorts of information. If you don’t always want to click the Run button, you can also use the shortcut ⌘ + r instead.

2. Getting the current font

There are many ways to access your current font through code, but here we are going to look at CurrentFont(). You can find an overview of all the ways to get a font through scripting here: How to get a font.

print(CurrentFont())

<RFont 'RoboType Italic' path='/path/to/font/RFTextItalic.ufo' at 17778370000>

If we print out our CurrentFont we can see that we get this object called ‘RFont’. With this RFont we can use it to get other information, like it’s name, which layers are inside the font, or where the font is located.

For example, if we want to see which glyphs in the font are selected, we can type this (make sure you have some glyphs selected):

myFont = CurrentFont()
print(myFont.selectedGlyphs)

(<RGlyph 'A' ('public.default') at 6287775344>, <RGlyph 'Agrave' ('public.default') at 23510980976>, <RGlyph 'Aacute' ('public.default') at 23510989424>)

You should now get an overview of all your selected glyphs. What we get here are not “just” glyphs, but RGlyphs. Maybe you guessed it already, but the R stands for RoboFont.

3. Getting the current glyph

Just like there is a special function to get the current font, there is also one to get the current glyph: CurrentGlyph(). Select a glyph and run the following:

print(CurrentGlyph())

This will give you a RGlyph again! We can ask this RGlyph for a lot of information, like it’s name, mark color, width… You can find an overview of these on the RGlyph page.

myGlyph = CurrentGlyph()
print(myGlyph.name, myGlyph.width)

Agrave 571

RECAP: Example script

Now let’s combine the two pieces of script we saw before. Let’s say we want to check the width for all of our selected glyphs.

We first need to get our CurrentFont, then loop over the selected glyphs, and print out their name and width. In python we can do this with a for loop, like this:

myFont = CurrentFont()
for glyph in myFont.selectedGlyphs:
    print(glyph.width, glyph.name)

571 A
571 Agrave
571 Aacute
556 Acircumflex
571 Adieresis

TO BE CONTINUED

3. Looping over glyphs in a font

Another very handy function is AllFonts(), this will give you a list of all your fonts currently open.

print(AllFonts())

[<RFont 'RoboType Roman' path='path/to/font/RFTextRoman.ufo' at 17327762144>, <RFont 'RoboType Bold' path='path/to/font/RFTextBold.ufo' at 17327757488>]

We can use a for loop to go over each font in the list, like this.

for font in AllFonts():
    print(font)

Here is an example of what a quick script could look like that loops over all the open fonts and that prints the family and style name for each of them.

for font in AllFonts():
    print(font.info.familyName, font.info.styleName)

RoboType abc
RoboType Roman
RoboType Bold