Hey y’all.

So outside of programming i do create (fictional human) languages, which often have their writing systems, which means fonts because I’d like to be able to write about (and in) said languages on the computer. And encountering that I found out a sad reality.

The existing options for complex font creation available are, as far as I can tell:

• Very expensive professional software that costs several hundreds of euros to purchase (which i cannot afford), when it’s not a subscription model. (e.g. Fontlab, FontCreator, ...)
• Rather limited tools that only work for basic linear alphabets but struggle as soon as one needs anything more advanced
• FontForge, which while extremely powerful, is also in need of a deep UI redesign[^1]
• Fontmake, which converts an xml based format into proper opentype fonts, and overall works great if one ignores the part that implies handwriting several thousand lines of XML.
• MetaFont, which has a really nice dev-facing API, if one doesn't mind being locked with TeX fonts that can't be used elsewhere

So I decided to write my own (which outputs the XML directory format that Fontmake ingests because the opentype binary format is wild and I didn't feel like dealing with it for the time being).

-# [^1]: Also fontforge keeps segfaulting on my system and I cannot figure out why.

Here is a screenshot of the test font I made to see if my stuff works

-# code is at https://sr.ht/~annwan/mkfont if people want to look at subpar haskell