Examples for write_fonts

[expenses]

It'd be great to have a minimal example for how to write out a font from a set of glyphs. I'm specifically interested in unicode CJK characters.

[cmyr]

what format are your glyphs in initially? Assuming you have outlines in some raw format (i.e. not from an existing font) this is not a trivial task, and amounts to writing a font compiler. We're working on one of those over at https://github.com/googlefonts/fontc, and that code uses write-fonts as a dependency.

[expenses]

fontc seems like a great recommendation, thanks! I'm attempting to add pronunciation ligatures for CJK characters (mostly chinese with pinyin at the moment) similar to https://github.com/parlr/hanzi-pinyin-font/releases. For this I want to be able to take an existing font, shrink down the character outlines, position a string of glyphs for the ligature (with the same font) and combine the outlines.

My current approach is to use fontforge to convert a .ttf font to .svg, modify that and then convert it back. This is slow though and leads to some precision issues.

[rsheeter]

If you have sources it might be better to transform the sources. If you only have a binary then you could likely write a FontTools python tool that takes in the binary, makes the desired modifications, and emits an updated binary.