Introduction to Unified Font Objects
Posted: Wed Jun 10, 2020 10:24 pm
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:
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++
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.
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 (34.53 KiB) Viewed 8915 times
- UFO 01.png (15.37 KiB) Viewed 8915 times
- UFO 02.png (15.28 KiB) Viewed 8915 times
- UFO 03.png (15.21 KiB) Viewed 8915 times
- UFO 04.png (15.22 KiB) Viewed 8915 times
- UFO 05.png (15.37 KiB) Viewed 8915 times
- UFO 06.png (15.29 KiB) Viewed 8915 times
- UFO Archive.png (6.01 KiB) Viewed 8908 times