How can I hand-code an otf file?

#1

Fontself is great, but I have some scenarios in which I’ll need to generate fonts on the fly, with more programmatic behavior. Hard to describe, but if you see my http://brailletoolbox.com/decode.html you’ll see what I’m up to. Eventually, I’ll be generating braille fonts for multiple languages, and enabling people to create their own braille code fonts.

Project Plan:
Use Fontself to prototype some glyphs > Evaluate that in code > Get a developer to build the programmatic font generator script (this will be on the web, so javascript)

Where can I learn the hand coding font part? I imagine there’s a steep learning curve, but I’d like to get started.

#2

Hello,
I didn’t understand what you wanted to achieve with the project.
In my opinion, there are two ways to assign braille to the codes (letters):

  1. A, B, C … in ASCII code 65, 66, 67 … show the glyphs of the braille. This is how I did it with the maritime signal flags, for example. See https://www.behance.net/gallery/93032689/Maritime-Signal-Flags-as-Font-made-in-Illustrator
  2. in Unicode there is a range from U+280x to U+28Fx for the glyphs in braille. So these can be part of a normal character set. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille )
    (French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Braille )

“Where can I learn the hand coding font part?” - what do you mean by ‘hand coding’?

BTW: I do a lot of programing in Javascript :slight_smile:
Best regards,
Jens

#3

More about braille later - I think I should mock up the use case and you’ll see what I mean.

What I mean by the hand coding question is that I’d like a webapp to generate an otf file on the fly.
Hand coding is the means by which I’d understand the raw code of a font, by which I could direct a developer to create font files.

But I think that will make more sense when I illustrate it.

#4

Ok, I see.

I’m beginning to understand what you’re trying to do. In my eyes, the best way is to use SVG as an intermediate step and then you can convert SVG to an OTF. You can find suitable javascripts in github for example https://github.com/westracer/fontify
However, pay attention to the licence conditions.

#5

Interesting, thanks.