Setting font infos ↩
- OpenType fonts
- Setting font infos in RoboFont
- Required attributes
- Recommended attributes
- Other attributes
OpenType fonts
Fonts are digital files and must be produced according to technical standards. All bits of data in a font are relevant and should be set properly.
An OpenType font consists of several tables, and each table contains a particular kind of information. The official reference for what goes where in an OpenType font is the OpenType specification.
Setting font infos in RoboFont
In RoboFont, font info data can be set manually with the Font Info sheet, or programatically using a script.
However you choose to set your infos, it is not necessary to fill in all fields. RoboFont can compute missing data automatically if some basic attributes are set. Just keep the Use default value option checked if you don’t have specific needs.
When generating OpenType fonts, RoboFont uses the ufo2fdk library to pass the UFO to the AFDKOAdobe Font Developer Kit for OpenType. A suite of tools for generating OpenType fonts.. The actual computation of fallback values is handled by ufo2fdk/fontInfoData.py.
Required attributes
The following attributes are the minimum necessary for generating a working OpenType font:
- Family Name
- Style Name
- Units Per Em
- Descender
- x-height
- Cap-height
- Ascender
Make sure to set these values in the early stages of a project, so you can generate valid test fonts.
Recommended attributes
The following attributes provide important information about a font, so it is highly recommended to set them:
- Style Map Family Name
- Version Major
- Version Minor
- Copyright
- Trademark
- License
- License URL
- Designer
- Designer URL
- Manufacturer
- Manufacturer URL
- Sample Text
- usWidthClass
- usWeightClass
- achVendID
- fsType
- ulUnicodeRange
- ulCodePageRange
- sTypoLineGap
Make sure to set these values before you distribute your fonts.
Other attributes
If left empty, all other font info attributes are calculated automatically.
You can, of course, override automatic values and set any attribute manually. However, do that only if you know what you’re doing.