TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri May 31 14:22:37 EDT 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

ABOUT

Modular Font Editor K (or MFEK) [Fredrick R. Brennan]

Modular Font Editor K (MFEK) is an open source modular font editor by Fred Brennan. It attempts to apply the Unix adage that each program should do one thing and do it well to a GUI font editor. As of early 2021, MFEK was still in an alpha stage.

Brennan sketches the free font editor situation at the end of 2020: Many have tried to replace FontForge---all have failed. I might fail, in fact, history says I probably will. Yet, the current state of affairs is so bad I feel I must try. Progress on FontForge has ground to a halt, and often I felt I was the only one interested in continuing to make progress. It's not hard to understand why this has happened. Maintaining FontForge is hard. Adding new features to it is harder. It is written in a language fewer and fewer people know and requires C skills fewer and fewer people have. So let's look at where we really stand in the world of open source fonts. We stand in a fragmented landscape, and people keep coming along with massive projects like TruFont and Runebender to unify this fragmented landscape, and failing. Meanwhile, as FontForge can do less and less of what we need in modern fonts (emoji fonts, rand feature, OpenType Variations), we get more and more fragmented, and "font editor" needs to do more and more.

Brennan wants to create fonts using only open source software. So he continues: So, "font editor" is just becoming proprietary, Glyphsapp. This is intolerable. Open source fonts should not need proprietary software to build. Glyphsapp is very powerful which is why it is dangerous. And can we blame its users? I can't. We need a solution that uses the benefits of open source software instead of its weaknesses. So, I propose, we need a modular solution, not a monolith. We don't need "font editor". What we need are ways to test a UFO font with a nice UI, to write OpenType Layout code, to draw glyphs. We need font editors, that is to say, modular interoperable programs, interoperable also with Glyphs and FontForge via the UFO format, each program doing one job, and some day, hopefully, we will have enough programs that we no longer need FontForge, but only some parts of it I and others will be splitting off into C libraries.

Later in 2021, Matthew Blanchard and Fredrick Brennan released MFEK Stroke, a set of utilities for stroking paths in font glyphs written in Rust. MFEKstroke takes UFO .glif files and applies path stroking algorithms to them. Five stroking algorithms are provided: PAP (Pattern-Along-Path), VWS (Variable Width Stroking), CWS (Constant Width Stroking), DASH (Dashes and dots along paths), and Nib (requires FontForge be installed, as it uses libfontforge). The authors wrote: This makes MFEKstroke more complete in this department than Glyphsapp, FontForge or Runebender. Youtube demo

EXTERNAL LINKS
Modular Font Editor K (or MFEK)
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Font creation programs ⦿