It is needed to build MFEKglif, including it would make life easier for new users.

The link in the "Flow" section points towards Simon Cozen's fontFeatures repo, but it should point towards https://github.com/simoncozens/fez

https://www.drawbot.com/
https://github.com/typemytype/drawbot
typemytype/drawbot#121
https://robofont.com/tags/#drawbot
https://pythonfordesigners.com/

DrawBot is Mac-only software that is commonly used in the type industry for making specimen images, animations, booklets, etc. A tool like this is something I would like to see in a modular font editor.

There have been attempts to make clones in the past:

• http://shoebot.github.io/shoebot/
• https://xxyxyz.org

In my opinion, past attempts have struggled due to lack of 1:1 compatibility with DrawBot, there are lots of DrawBot scripts available and used in existing projects, so breaking compatibility will make getting new users more difficult.

However, maybe something like DrawBot but for Rust instead of Python would be the best way to go?

Due to a plateau in progress, the MFEK Core Team† met today (August 26, 2021) to figure out how to get the project unstuck. I'm developing a companion font to FRB American Cursive, consisting of two forms of block letters, a regular letter and an italic letter. As part of this project, I'm going to rebuild the cursive as well, with the updates to MFEKstroke to improve its design characteristics in critical areas. The title this project has, “Noto Hand”, is aspirational—@davelab6 wants to publish what I do finish on Google Fonts, but whether this actually becomes a Noto font in the end, or I have to give it another name, really entirely depends on what we achieve here.

So, let's shoot for the moon and hopefully land somewhere in the stars if not on the moon itself.

FRB American Cursive is the first production font to heavily rely on MFEK. However, it makes use of a lot of third party tools to fill in gaps in MFEK's functionality. To unstick the project, we will remove especially Inkscape and FontForge, the large GUI tools required. We will make improvements to MFEKstroke such as benefit Noto Hand. My ultimate goal is that where FRB American Cursive has a very complex, bespoke build process which is full of hardcoded paths, hardcoded glyph names, unexplained numbers, undocumented data files, and arcane UFO “fudging”*, the builds for these first three Noto Hand fonts will all rely on the same repository to build them, and will only require MFEK, fontTools, and fontmake. Hopefully we come out of this with a system for building skeleton fonts based on single strokes…if that's achieved, this really could become a Noto family, with people with knowledge of different scripts producing educational fonts for that script, or style of script.‡

We have divided this sprint into seven weeks. Work weeks begin on Sundays. Saturdays are off.

• Week 1: 29 August – 3 September (28 August off)
• Week 2: 5 September – 10 September (4 September off)
• Week 3: 12 September – 17 September (11 September off)
• Week 4: 19 September – 24 September (18 September off)
• Week 5: 26 September – 1 October (25 September off)
• Week 6: 3 October – 8 October (2 October off)
• Week 7: 10 October – 15 October (9 October off)

Goal A — Improve MFEKstroke

• - Pattern overwriting - Week 1 Matt
• - Pattern alignment begin/end - Week 1 Matt
• - Stroke specific contour (--contour 0) - Week 1 Matt
• - Add dash mode to MFEKStroke - Week 2 Matt
• - Add path reverse mode -- Week 2 Matt

Goal B — Make Noto Hand rely on MFEK and not FontForge or Inkscape at all

(All to be done by Fred during Week 1.)

• -patterns.mk: remove patterns sfd make ufo pattern source -
• -buildccmp.py: replace fontforge with fonttoolls.ufolib
• -delete sfd and use ufos natively
• -list_glyphs use fonttools.ufolib

Editor related Goal B tasks

• - Guideline picking needs fix. -- Week 3 Matt
• - Refactor needs testing. -- Week 2 Fred
• - Fix color output. (low priority) -- Week 7? Fred

Font

(All to be done by Fred during weeks 3–4.)

• - Cyrillic for Italic + Regular -- Week 3
• - Review google list of required glyphs. -- Week 3
• - Spacing and alignment -- Week 4

Goal C — MFEKufo (font view)

Plan here is TODO. For weeks 4–6; Matt & Fredrick.

Week 7 — Polish and look for bugs in all of the above.

<sup>† Heh, lofty title for myself and @MatthewBlanchard. @davelab6 was there for some of the planning of this sprint.
* Literally, there's a script that runs as part of the build process named fudge_fontinfo.py.
‡ Normal Noto project Sans/Serif are named after Unicode blocks. However, we have to be far more open about our naming here because of the wide diversity of “standard” type designs used to teach children handwriting around the world, some of which are even enshrined in law in some countries or by recommendations of national bodies. Therefore, the naming scheme is for now “Noto Hand DEMONYM STYLE”, where STYLE is attempted to be generalized as one of “Cursive”, “Print”, or “Italic”, as I feel this can apply broadly to the educational fonts used in many countries of diverse scripts. This naming scheme hasn't been come up with by Noto project, I came up with it, and it's subject to change. For example, while both Parisian French and American English are written in the Latin alphabet, very different influences were had on their textbook hands, leading to the American focusing heavily on connection and being heavily slanted while the French is upright and sees lifting the pen as no great sacrifice.</sup>

I have a very basic pre-alpha Qstroke in the works with Simon's library, which is making me think: with Qstroke, Qmetadata, and Qglif, it's getting to be a lot of modules, and this will only increase.

I'm going to want to perhaps make this toplevel repo a Cargo workspace with Git submodules for every MFEQ module and a quick instruction about recursive Git submodule initialization.