Introducing ufoJS

Project to build a JavaScript library that works with the Unified Font Object Format by porting the API of FontTools and RoboFab. Under the MIT License.

Fork, clone or download: ufoJS on gitHub.

The Project

I was am tired of platform bound font editors, myself using Linux almost exclusively. Thus, beeing a web-developer most of my time, I naturally liked the idea of doing a font editor in the browser. So, last year I started porting parts of the Python libraries FontTools and RoboFab to JavaScript in my spare time. With the first goal of rendering the path data of UFO — Unified Font Object .glif files in a browser. Now, most of the ported code is based around the pen APIs and I can show you something.

Look at it.

On the left side you can see the example application included from the project folder using an iframe object to include it here. It discovers the available glyphs by reading the contents.plist file of an UFO font and renders the path data of the selected .glif file using SVG. The font you can see is the DemoFont.ufo taken from the RoboFab package.

Technical

The library can be used in Gecko and Webkit browsers and in NodeJS. The latter has some external dependencies. The Browser dependent parts are yet only in the sample application but use dojo as well.

Loading

For Module loading I am using an AMD (Asyncronous Module Definition) Loader. This nicely helps to organize code, is standardized and loads the stuff fast. In the browser facing code I'm using bdload. For nodeJs r.js of the requireJS project is utilized.

Testing

Check out the Test Page. This is done using the D.O.H: Dojo Objective Harness and this is the only thing you can run with nodeJS as well.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012 3:02:59 PM Europe/Berlin