yanone / babelfont

Interrogate and manipulate UFO, TTF and OTF fonts with a common interface

Babelfont: Load, examine and save fonts in a variety of formats

This describes Babelfont >3.0, which is a complete rewrite from the previous version.

Babelfont is a utility for loading fonts and examining fonts in a variety of formats. It can also be used to write fonts in some of these formats, making it possible to convert between font formats.

Here are the formats which are currently supported:

Format	Read	Write
Glyphs 2	*	*
Glyphs 3	*	*
.glyphspackage	*
UFO	*
Designspace	*
Fontlab VFJ	partial
TTF	partial	*
OTF	partial
Babelfont	*	*

Babelfont converts all of the above font formats into a intermediary set of objects, whose object hierarchy can be seen here. The allows the developer to examine any font (single master or variable), without needing to worry about the details of each font format.

For example:

from babelfont import load

font = load("Myfont.glyphs") # Or .designspace, or whatever
default_a = font.default_master.get_glyph_layer("A")
top_anchor = default_a.anchors_dict["top"].x
print("Top anchor = (%i,%i)" % (top_anchor.x, top_anchor.y))
print("LSB, RSB = (%i,%i)" % (default_a.lsb, default_a.rsb))
font.save("Myfont.ttf")