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.

📣 News

• The Python port of psautohint will be (re)integrated into the AFDKO repository as "otfautohint":
  • A release will be made on August 28th, 2023
  • Please feel free to try pre-release v4.0.0a in the meantime
  • More information can be found in docs/otfautohint_Notes.md

Installation

The AFDKO requires Python 3.8 or later. Regarding Python 3.11: while Python 3.11 itself is now relatively stable, we are waiting to let some known tool-chain problems resolve.

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 python3.8
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 .

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.