Introduction to Unified Font Objects

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Bhikkhu Pesala
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Introduction to Unified Font Objects

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

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:
H_glif.png
H_glif.png (34.53 KiB) Viewed 6582 times
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 01.png
UFO 01.png (15.37 KiB) Viewed 6582 times
UFO 02.png
UFO 02.png (15.28 KiB) Viewed 6582 times
UFO 03.png
UFO 03.png (15.21 KiB) Viewed 6582 times
UFO 04.png
UFO 04.png (15.22 KiB) Viewed 6582 times
UFO 05.png
UFO 05.png (15.37 KiB) Viewed 6582 times
UFO 06.png
UFO 06.png (15.29 KiB) Viewed 6582 times
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
UFO Archive.png (6.01 KiB) Viewed 6575 times
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
Husham
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Re: Introduction to Unified Font Objects

Post by Husham »

thank you Bhikkhu for your explanation about UFO.
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