gerb

☛ Development has stopped as of 2023-05-03. Discussion

*gerb ʰ-: reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root, meaning to carve
gerb: a font editor in gtk3 and Rust

Editing a glyph.

^{_{☛ See the Screenshots section.}}

gerb is a GUI font editor and IDE. It is not production ready, but all the basics are implemented.

It uses the UFOv3 format and can import:¹

UFOv2 directories
Glyphs files

and export:²

OpenType files (.otf)
TrueType files (.ttf)

ℹ️ Interested in contributing? Consult `CONTRIBUTING.md`.

Features

import from other font source formats
export to .otf and .ttf
configurable shortcuts system
unlimited undos
embedded python shell and API for scripting and plugins (work in progress)
git integration (work in progress)
themeable (work in progress)

Future features

work with designspaces (tracking issue #22)

Screenshots ³

Alternative software

FontForge is the indisputable FOSS font editor. Realistically this is the only choice one has for making a professional quality typeface with free software.

Some other projects in development are:

runebender: development seems to have slowed down (as of Wed 15 Mar 2023). Unfortunately, the project —while excellent— looks like it is encumbered by its UI toolkit's development. In contrast, gerb uses the standard FOSS UI toolkit, gtk.
MFEK: it's focused on splitting every functionality into micro-libraries. gerb's technical goal is shipping a font editor.

Install

Packages

Packages are available:

NetBSD https://pkgsrc.se/fonts/gerb
Debian / Ubuntu as .deb files included with each release
Arch Linux https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gerb-git

It is also installable from crates.io: cargo install gerb

Prebuilt GNU/Linux & macos amd64 binaries

See 'Releases' for binaries of tagged releases built in the CI.

Build

To build, you will need Rust's cargo tool. You can get it from your distribution's packages, or directly with the official rustup tool. If the build fails because of missing system libraries, see the Dependencies section of the README.

Download or clone the git repository with your method of choice, e.g.:

git clone https://github.com/epilys/gerb.git
cd gerb
cargo build --release

Dependencies

Needs gtk-3. For the python feature you'll need libpython3.9 or greater.

On Debian and relatives:

apt install libgtk-3-dev

On macOS you can install dependencies with Homebrew:

brew install librsvg gtk+3 gnome-icon-theme

Run & Configuration

You can open a UFOv3 project from the GUI ( File->Open or Ctrl+O ) or directly in the command line with the -u flag. Assuming the project directory is "/path/to/font.ufo":

# Directly calling the binary:
gerb -u /path/to/font.ufo
# Running through cargo
cargo run --release -- -u /path/to/font.ufo

Configuration of various settings is stored at the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gerb directory in a TOML file. The usual location would be $HOME/.config/gerb/config.toml. dconf is not used but PRs that add dconf support are welcome.

Import is performed with fontTools and glyphsLib. ↩
Export is performed with ufo2ft. ↩
The screenshot typeface is Sporting Grotesque. ↩

epilys/gerb