Fwd: [New post] New from Adobe Type: Open-sourced font development tools

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From: "The Typekit Blog" <[email protected]>
Date: 19 Sep 2014 17:24
Subject: [New post] New from Adobe Type: Open-sourced font development tools
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   David Lemon posted: "Adobe has established a strong relationship with
the open source community over the years, and the shape of it today is as
robust as ever. We’ve released a growing set of open source font families
on GitHub – Source Sans, Source Code, Source Serif, and mo"    Respond to
this post by replying above this line
      New post on *The Typekit Blog*
<http://blog.typekit.com/author/davidclemon/>  New from Adobe Type:
Open-sourced font development tools
<http://blog.typekit.com/2014/09/19/new-from-adobe-type-open-sourced-font-development-tools/>
by
David Lemon <http://blog.typekit.com/author/davidclemon/>

Adobe has established a strong relationship with the open source community
over the years, and the shape of it today is as robust as ever. We’ve
released a growing set of open source font families
<https://github.com/adobe-fonts> on GitHub – Source Sans, Source Code,
Source Serif, and most recently Source Han Sans – that we continue to
update and expand. And last year, we contributed Adobe’s CFF font
rasterization code to the FreeType project
<http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/>, and as a result Android, Chrome OS,
and a growing number of Linux distributions now produce better-looking text
from CFF fonts. (CFF is the Compact Font Format, used in many OpenType
fonts.)

In line with those efforts I’m excited to announce that a version of
Adobe’s font development tools — the AFDKO, or Adobe Font Development Kit
for OpenType — is now available with an Apache open source license
<https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/afdko>. This is the same set of tools
we use on the Adobe Type team to design and update fonts. Recently we’ve
been using the ADFKO in conjunction with Superpolator
<http://superpolator.com> from Erik van Blokland, which provides a
convenient user interface and a level of flexibility unavailable with other
interpolation tools.

Superpolator is a manually-operated design tool, but since we update fonts
frequently – often hundreds at a time – we need to be able to automate the
process of rebuilding fonts that were built using Superpolator. So, we’ve
set up the AFDKO to work with MutatorMath
<https://github.com/LettError/mutatorMath>, the interpolation engine inside
Superpolator, and we’ve worked with Erik to release this engine under the
BDS-3 open source license at the same time we’re open sourcing the AFDKO.

The AFDKO has been available under a no-cost license since 2000, and its
underlying code is incorporated in all the commercial font editors. Open
sourcing the AFDKO and MutatorMath will lead to a new set of improvements
that benefit everyone.

   - Today’s commercial font tools will get better, which will lead to
   better fonts for everyone. There are developers who want to help us improve
   these tools, and open sourcing them makes it possible.
   - Thanks to MutatorMath, we will probably also see improvements in other
   font tools’ interpolation features.
   - Now that we’ve made the tools available under the Apache open source
   license, they can also be used in FontForge (the open source font editor),
   which means modern fonts can be used in the many open source products that
   require everything they ship to be compiled using open source tools.

Much of Superpolator’s value lies in its intuitive user interface, so we
expect people will continue to license the commercial tool. Similarly, we
will continue to provide the AFDKO with its traditional license via the AFDKO
page <http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko.html> on the Adobe Font
and Type Technology Center. The open source version
<https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/afdko> requires users to download the
appropriate version of the Python language interpreter and configure the
tools. There are also a couple of tools in the AFDKO — checkOutlines and IS
— that we couldn’t include because of patent restrictions, although we hope
to work around that issue in checkOutlines in the near future.

For more details about our font development tools, documentation and
release notes are available on the AFDKO page
<http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko.html>. We’re excited to release
these tools in a format that can reach more developers, and look forward to
seeing continued improvements to the tools we use to make type.
  *David Lemon <http://blog.typekit.com/author/davidclemon/>* | September
19, 2014 at 8:23 am | Categories: Making Type
<http://blog.typekit.com/?cat=12888478> | URL: http://wp.me/pwp26-3rh

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