Ramblings.txt

introduce yourself
Hello I'm Mirko Velimirovic

Welcome to
The Great Fontbakery show

before we start I just want to introduce people to a few resources that are useful

The Missing Semester;
https://missing.csail.mit.edu/
Ramble about missing semester

Another note, I'm going to be running most of this on the command line. It's worth it to get acquainted with how to use your computer's shell. 
I'm running ZSH
it's a shell like Bash but with some decoration and text completion. I've also kitted it out with oh my zsh which indicates (in this configuration) which branch I'm on in the git repo I'm working on. 


What is fb?
Fontbakery is Font QA software that can be run on the command line or on the fontbakery dashboard. https://fontbakery.graphicore.de/

Fonts are complicated and as such can become tedious to check thoroughly. Imagine you've just drawn your superfamily of 81 styles and now it's clipping in legacy Microsoft Office programs from before 2013. Why? Maybe you need a DSIG table, but that wasn't on the menu of things to think about when you made your masterpiece. Fontbakery will check for you. 

Fontbakery is part of a development cycle. As type designers we don't like to think of our fonts as software. They're art or they're a tool or they're some other abstract thing. The problem is (all theory aside) in practical terms fonts are software. we need to be able to test them as software. Font Development is Software development. 


I'm going to show you the complicated way to manage font development with a qa tool using git. You can also just use the fontbakery dashboard site, if all of this is a bit too technical, but where's the fun in that? 
https://fontbakery.graphicore.de/

point everyone to the repository. 
https://github.com/bghryct/TheGreatFontbakeryShow

Introduce people to the tools

Pip  https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/
Python https://www.python.org/downloads/
Venv https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html
fontbakery https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery
macdown https://macdown.uranusjr.com/
I use macdown to read FB reports it's a nice clean way to look at them
so send these to everyone beforehand

QA stands for Quality Assurance

In this workshop I'm going to show you how to use fontbakery on the command line as part of a git version controlled font build. We're going to be building Jost, which is a nifty paul renner inspired variable font designed by my friend Owen Earl of indestructible type insert link to indestructible and mastered by me. The font is available on google fonts. 

We won't be building the exact Google build because it's been tested to the moon and back, Instead we'll be building and testing an earlier version that has problems. Because the whole point of showing off QA software is to show how it can help you identify problems, and then how to fix them. 

install python3 
https://www.python.org/downloads/

Ok cool, let's get into it. We're going to speedily install everythin in our venv. I'm going to assume you've got python installed. Maybe make people install python before the workshop. (email everyone)

we're going to install a virtual environment. 
this will keep all of our tooling separate from system installs of python.
You're creating a safe environment/ sandbox to play with code. 

python3 -m venv venv

we're going to want to add the folder venv/ to our .gitignore so that we don't go uploading all of our tools to what should be a clean repo. 

for more on writing .gitignore look here. 
https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore

now we're going to activate our virtual environment:
source venv/bin/activate 


KEYCASTr

we're going to check what pip has installed for us in the venv
pip list

if you get a message saying pip isn't up to date 
pip install --upgrade pip

won't hurt to do this regardless

now we'll install fontbakery

pip install fontbakery

we'll check that it's installed with

pip list

cool, now we'll install fontmake

pip install fontmake

pip list

now we'll install gftools

pip install gftools

pip list

(to see if we've got everything)
alternatively you can just type 
gftools

now I'm going to build a font from source, 
so I'm going to navigate to the source folder,

I'm going vim build.sh
this will let us look at the build script I've written for this font. 
you could always open it in a text editor of your choice but vim is useful and it's right in the terminal. 

ok cool loooking at this build script it looks like it's going to build from the file source/jost.glyphs and it's going to be variable and the instance point coordinates will be rounded and the output path is going in the file source/vf/ as jost[slnt,wght].ttf

it also looks like it's running fontbakery at the end. Let's look at what that command means. 
fontbakery check-googlefonts ./source/vf/*.ttf --dark-theme --ghmarkdown jost_problems.md

cool ok let's run this build
quit vim by typing 
esc
:q
now run the build script by typing 
./build.sh

if this doesn't work you may have to give yourself permission (funny I know it's your computer)
chmod +x build.sh

Now we have a fontbakery report generated in markdown that we can read. I'm on a mac and I like to read these reports on macdown. 

open jost_problems.md

ok a few issues. Some of these are easy to fix with the gftools we downloaded. Let's see what happens when we re-implement them in our build.sh. 

open your build.sh and uncomment out lines
22-39

now save it. 

and run the build script again. 

you should be seeing less fails, 

now open up the md file again. Wow if everything worked correctly there should be fewer fails.

to end your venv fun simply type
deactivate

to start again
source venv/bin/activate

Talk about the duplicate fix. Open glyphs and fix, if there's time;

talk about the gftools fixes if time;

show how to use dashboard if time;

Thanks for attending my workshop everyone. And thank you TypeWknd for putting on an amazing conference.