A design festival for people who use type
Scripting RoboFont with Python
RoboFont is the most flexible font editor out there at the moment, in terms of extensibility and scriptability. It’s used by many type designers and major type design firms, and it’s often explicitly valued for those qualities. In this two day workshop you’ll get to learn the basics of Python scripting with RoboFont. You’ll write little scripts that do useful things as well as get a glimpse of how to write more complex things like extensions with a GUI.
For this workshop some Python experience is required. You either have learned some Python on your own or elsewhere, or have followed the “Python Programming with DrawBot for Beginners” workshop in the two days prior to this workshop.
Participants will need:
- A MacBook running OS X 10.9 or up
- RoboFont installed
Upon request, a temporary RoboFont trial license can be provided for the duration of the workshop.
About Just van Rossum
Photo: Aleksandra Samulenkova
Just van Rossum graduated in 1989 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, where he studied with Gerrit Noordzij. After stints at Monotype in the UK and MetaDesign in Berlin he became an independent type designer, focussing on software design for type. His collaborations with Erik van Blokland under the name LettError became well known and their FF Beowolf typeface has been included in the permanent collection of the MoMa in New York. His FF Lefthand typeface is as ubiquitous now as it was when it came out in 1991. He co-wrote RoboFog with Petr van Blokland in the mid-ninetees, which can be seen as a prerunner of RoboFont, and has been a very influential type design tool due to its groundbreaking scriptability with the Python programming language. His TTX/FontTools library is a crucial building block for lots of font software. He also wrote the original version of the DrawBot application. Just teaches type design and programming at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, both in the regular graphic design course as well as in the TypeMedia post-graduate course.