@laissez_vibrer @jleigh Welcome! Don't be shy about posting math and musical notation font stuff here.
Eli Heuer
Bezy developer
Look what virtual sorts can do!
No more split UI between the grid overview and the edit-mode/text editor. That was always awful for scripts like Arabic that have both very narrow and very wide glyphs.
I just pushed the code for this to the main branch.
@TiroTypeworks the typeface obviously matters. Helvetica is a good typeface and there are endless bad typefaces.
But if “Helvetica” is poorly engineered or has an annoying license attached to the software it is close to useless.
@TiroTypeworks a typeface is just an idea that no one can own, a Helvetica-like called 747372838584859383.ttf is still Helvetica.
AI can train on images of a typeface and spit out endless variations that are still that typeface.
Design is how it works, so the actual font is all that matters.
Today I worked on dragging and nudging sorts.
This can create UFO kerning data just from dragging sorts around with a mouse or trackpad.
The editor is built in a game engine, so controller support is easy. The workflow will look like: an AI agent does a pass on kerning all selected sorts, then you just mouse around the grid making small adjustments with the mouse.
Making fonts manually feels especially painful now that you know Cursor for fonts should exist but doesn’t.
I'm building it though, should be ready in time for RustConf in Seattle this year.
@iorsh it's a cross platform, works on Mac and Linux.
@iorsh yeah, doing RTL support is so much easier when you just do it from the start.
But "engineers" consistently kick the can down the road and make things hard on themselves.
You should try a PR for this!
Microsoft Edit is a really neat Rust project I've been looking at to learn how text editors work.
There is an open help wanted issue for RTL support. I think I'm going to try a PR for this just as a way to better understand how to do RTL for virtual fonts in Bezy.
I worked on the virtual sorts system today and looked at the Rust code for text editors like Zed and Microsoft's new Edit.
Writing a next-gen font editor basically requires making a full text editor that handles all global scripts, rendering font source files as a virtual font.
Learning about data-structures like gap buffers, piece tables, ropes, etc in the process.
@eWalthert if you don't see the problems Glyphs has caused clearly no amount of explanation will help, I'm working on an editor to replace it that is basically RoboFont done right.
@TiroTypeworks I don't trust any format that is built specifically for one editor. VFJ is barely human readable and is completely swagless compared to UFO.
In the design industry taste and aesthetics matter.
Chaos and order. This editor is designed so everything happens on one checkerboard grid, unlike most other editors that have an edit view and a separate grid view.
The grid view in most editors is square, which is annoying for Arabic, so this approach is much better for that.
The .glyphs format is awful for working with AI, UFO is FAR better.
Never feel intimidated by the "engineers" working on technical font stuff, the fact that this format almost became the default in open source is proof nobody has any idea what they are doing.
Font editors that aren't CLI first, open-source, and built on UFO-like human readable text first formats are ngmi in the era of human+AI collaboration.
If an LLM can't read the underlying representations and manipulate them and all of the related settings via scripting, then it also can't co-pilot your product with existing professionals and it doesn't allow vibe coding for the 100X more aspiring prosumers.
My goal with this editor is to cook so hard that they start calling it American style instead of Swiss style.
I got a basic virtual "sorts" system working in my font editor in Rust project.
This is the first building block for having a full Glyphs-like text editor.
Rendering the preview sort with all the off-curve points as on-curve points was claude-4-sonnet's idea, but I like it and will keep it for now.
@liaizon post version 1.0 yes, I'm trying to get it there by the end of the summer.
I can try to get a WASM web version working sooner.
Eli Heuer boosted:
I added virtual “sorts” to the Bezy font editor today.
This is the first step to building a Glyphs-style text editor inside a font editor.
This is still on the “deslop” branch, but will be in main by the end of the day.
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