fontsurgery-tools

A collection of simple scripts (for macOS only) that install a font-development toolchain — fontTools, fontmake, harfbuzz, ttfautohint, and dozens more — in one double-click.

⚠️ Archived (2017). This is a historical snapshot from April 2017. It still bootstraps a working font-hacking setup, but the world moved on: Homebrew now installs most of these tools directly (brew install fonttools harfbuzz ttfautohint), the Python libraries live on PyPI (pip install fonttools fontmake), and the Python 2 halves below are obsolete. Keep it for reference, or as a starting point you’ll want to prune. It is no longer actively maintained.

— Adam Twardoch, 5 April 2017

Download for macOS

👉🏿 fontsurgery-tools-master.zip

Installation on macOS

1. Unpack the downloaded fontsurgery-tools-master.zip
2. Go to the macOS folder inside the unpacked fontsurgery-tools-master folder.
3. Double-click on install-macos.command.

The script may run for some 10-20 minutes as it downloads and installs various libraries, and you should be ready to hack your fonts.

At the end, it’ll open the websites where you can download and manually install further tools:

• Apple Font Tools for Xcode 8.2 or newer
• Adobe FDK for OpenType, AFDKO

Notes

• If you find that the installation does not work, please report an issue on Github.
• The scripts use Homebrew, a macOS management utility for command-line apps, which it installs when needed.
• Some libraries (“dependencies”) are not usable directly, but they are installed because other tools or libraries need them.
• In the macOS folder, there is a upgrade-macos.command script which will install fresh versions of the various tools. You can run it from time to time.
• In the macOS-devel folder, there are install-macos-dev.command and upgrade-macos-dev.command scripts which will install cutting-edge versions of the same libraries as the regular script does (but those versions may fail installing or not work properly!) Note that the Python libraries will be installed in “development” mode, i.e. inside the macOS-devel/modules/src folder. So if you use this method, please place your unpacked fontsurgery-tools-master folder in some reasonable location, and possibly rename it (I recommend /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Developer/fontsurgery-tools).

Non-Python tools and libraries

• otfcc
• t1utils
• lcdf-typetools
• freetype
• icu
• fontconfig
• cairo
• fribidi
• harfbuzz
• ttfautohint

Python tools and libraries

• The scripts install the newest Python 2.7.x and the newest Python 3.x, even though macOS already has them, but those come in an older version.
• Many of the Python libraries come with standalone command-line utilities.
• The Python libraries are installed for both Python 2.x and 3.x.
• The Python libraries are installed in the “user location” i.e. /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Python. This makes it easy to see what’s going on.
• unicodedata2
• fontMath
• ufoLib
• fonttools
• compreffor
• cu2qu
• glyphsLib
• ufo2ft
• MutatorMath
• booleanOperations
• defcon
• fontmake
• feaPyFoFum
• ufo-extractor
• glyph-name-formatter
• designSpaceDocument
• pyparsing
• vttLib
• nototools
• font-line
• shapeops
• PyICU

Python 2 only:

• robofab
• fontParts
• ufo2fdk
• woffTools
• fontbakery

Python 3 only:

• qahirah
• python_freetype
• pybidi
• harfpy