Revive this project

[chengluyu]

trafficstars

It’d been three years since the last functional update. Now I know fonts more and I think it’s time to revive this project. I will start with collecting related works.

Plan

Possible Solution

• 2021-03-16 FontForge with Python is a good way to go. But I’d like to stay with JavaScript/TypeScript.

[chengluyu]

The idea: create “native” ligature symbols from the font.

Features I’d like to see.

• Include more ligature symbols (most important one, of course).
• Download fonts from the official Plex Mono distributions (rather than providing your own).

And some thoughts about details.

• No longer use OTFCC because IBM/plex provides sources now so we can make use of that.
• Generate glyphs directly rather than composing them by glyph references.

[yisibl]

Can IBM/plex generate ttf fonts? How does the performance compare to otfcc?

[chengluyu]

Well, according to its README, the build process requires FontLab Studio, which costs hundreds of dollars. But the source is of UFO format, so I think I can generate fonts with FontForge, which is free.