Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO)

The AFDKO is a set of tools for building OpenType font files from
PostScript and TrueType font data.

This repository contains the data files, Python scripts, and sources for
the command line programs that comprise the AFDKO. The project uses the
Apache 2.0 Open Source license.
Please note that the AFDKO makes use of several dependencies, listed in the
requirements.txt file, which will automatically be installed if you install
AFDKO with pip. Most of these dependencies are BSD or MIT license, with
the exception of tqdm, which is MPL 2.0.

Please refer to the
AFDKO Overview
for a more detailed description of what is included in the package.

Please see the
wiki
for additional information, such as links to reference materials and related
projects.

📣 Recent News

The Python port of psautohint was (re)integrated into the AFDKO repository as “otfautohint”

More information can be found in docs/otfautohint_Notes.md

Installation

The AFDKO requires Python 3.9
or later. It should work with any Python > 3.9, but occasionally
tool-chain components and dependencies don’t keep pace with major
Python releases, so there might be some lag time while they catch up.

Releases are available on the Python Package
Index (PyPI) and can be installed
with pip.

Note for macOS users: we recommend that you do not use the system
Python. Among other reasons, some versions of macOS ship with Python 2
and the latest version of the AFDKO is only available for Python 3. You
can find instructions for using Brew to install Python 3 on macOS here:
Installing Python 3 on Mac OS X.
Also: pyenv is a great tool for
installing and managing multiple Python versions on macOS.

Note for all users: we STRONGLY recommend the use of a Python virtual
environment (venv)
and the use of python -m pip install <package> to install all packages
(not just AFDKO). Calling pip install directly can result in the
wrong pip being called, and the package landing in the wrong location.
The combination of using a venv + python -m pip install helps to ensure
that pip-managed packages land in the right place.

Note for Linux users (and users of other platforms that are not macOS or Windows): When there is not a pre-built “wheel” for your platform pip will attempt to build the C and C++ portions of the package from source. This process will only succeed if both the C and C++ development tools and libuuid are installed. See build from source below.

Installing

Option 1 (Recommended)

• Create a virtual environment:

  python -m venv afdko_env
  

• Activate the virtual environment:

  • macOS & Linux

    source afdko_env/bin/activate
    

  • Windows

    afdko_env\Scripts\activate.bat
    

• Install afdko:

  python -m pip install afdko
  

Installing the afdko inside a virtual environment prevents conflicts
between its dependencies and other modules installed globally.

Option 2 (not recommended unless there is a global conflict)

Local user installation afdko (info):

python -m pip install --user afdko

Updating

Use the -U (or --upgrade) option to update the afdko (and its
dependencies) to the newest stable release:

python -m pip install -U afdko

To get pre-release and in-development versions, use the --pre flag:

python -m pip install -U afdko --pre

Uninstalling

To remove the afdko package use the command:

python -m pip uninstall afdko

Build from source

First you must have installed the development tools for your platform.

On macOS, install these with:

xcode-select --install

On Linux (Ubuntu 17.10 LTS or later), install these with:

apt-get -y install python3.9
apt-get -y install python-pip
apt-get -y install python-dev
apt-get -y install uuid-dev

On other POSIX-like operating systems, libuuid and its header files
may be in a package named libuuid-devel or util-linux-libs. The
source code for libuuid is maintained in the
util-linux repository.

On Windows, you need Visual Studio 2017 or later.

To build the afdko from source, clone the afdko GitHub
repository, ensure the wheel
module is installed (python -m pip install wheel), then cd to the top-level
directory of the afdko, and run:

python -m pip install .

Developing

If you’d like to develop & debug AFDKO using Xcode, run:

CMake -G Xcode .

For further information on building from source see
docs/FDK_Build_Notes.md.

Note

It’s not possible to install the afdko in editable/develop mode using
python -m pip install -e . ; this is because the toolkit includes binary C executables
which setup.py tries to install in the bin/ (or Scripts/) folder, however
this process was only meant to be used with text-based scripts (either
written in Python or a shell scripting language). To work around this problem
(which really only impacts the few core afdko developers who need to get live
feedback as they modify the source files) you can use alternative methods like
exporting a PYTHONPATH, using a .pth file or similar hacks.
For further details read this comment.

Major changes from version 2.5.x

• The AFDKO has been restructured so that it can be installed as a Python
  package. It now depends on the user’s Python interpreter, and no longer
  contains its own Python interpreter.

• Two programs, IS and checkoutlines were dropped because their source
  code could not be open-sourced. These tools are available in release version
  2.5.65322 and older.

Note

If you install the old AFDKO as well as the new PyPI afdko package, the tools from
the newer version will take precedence over the older. This happens because pip
adds the afdko’s package path at the beginning of the system’s PATH environment
variable, whereas the old installer adds it at the end; this modification to PATH
is not undone by the uninstaller. If you want to completely remove the path to the
newer version, you will have to edit the PATH. On the Mac, this means editing the
line in your login file that sets the PATH variable. On Windows, this means editing
the PATH environment variable in the system’s Control Panel.