Introduction to Unified Font Objects

The latest release of FontCreator 13 adds support for Export font as UFO. This option is on the file menu. When I first heard about this format a few weeks ago the only UFO I knew about was referring to possible alien spaceships.

A Unified Font Object is a series of human readable files that allow transfer of font data between different Font Editors. I exported one of my fonts, and had a look at the data for the capital H glyph. It looks like this:
UFO 04.png
It maps every point in the H contour, and is easy to understand. I show screen shots from FontCreator with successive points selected, starting from the first point. Look at the hintline x and y co-ordinates and compare to the *.glif contour data in the code view in notepad++
UFO 03.png
UFO 02.png
UFO 01.png
H_glif.png
UFO 06.png
UFO 05.png
If you need to backup a Unified Font Object, archive the entire folder with 7-Zip using the PPMd compression method to reduce the size to about 7% of the size. PPMd is optimised for compressing plain text files.
UFO Archive.png

thank you Bhikkhu for your explanation about UFO.