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If you're worried that illustrator files are too proprietary, you should really consider working in postscript. illustrator will deal with properly handwritten
by nsfmc 13y ago
If you're worried that illustrator files are too proprietary, you should really consider working in postscript. illustrator will deal with properly handwritten postscript just fine and it's a mostly straightforward graphics dsl (especially if you're mostly doing icon design). plus, it's easy to convert to a pdf or rasterize it using any number of readily available tools.
if your concern is that the tools for creating OTFs and TTFs seem to be opaque, i would suggest you look at the UFO[1] specification which represents a font as a folder containing a series of glyphs which are, themselves, a highly domain-specific hybrid of svg and postscript. the AFDKO [2] added support for UFO last month(!), so there seems to be traction on that front. fontforge, natch, has supported ufo for quite a while.
the problem with picking on fontawesome is that for icon sets to work, they usually need to be consistent and it's hard enough to get people to agree to code style guidelines, much less visual ones which are wayyyy more philosophical.
in any case, if there's a takeaway it's to look at UFO, it will at least provide you with a free and transparent workflow, but how you manage that workflow will still be a challenge.
If you (or anyone else reading this) want to work on this problem, i'm happy to talk offline since i've been doing a ufo fork of fontawesome for work lately and have accumulated some domain knowledge on that front.
[1]: http://unifiedfontobject.org/ http://unifiedfontobject.org/
[2]: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko.html
- susi22 13y agoI meant a DSL (or at least a framework) to _create_ graphics. I don't propose a new file format. In my approach there is no such thing as a GUI tool since that usually means that you'll be editing a complex (non gittable) file format. I want to compile the source code to SVG/EPS, then use open source tools (such as fontforge) to create the font. But you don't have to, you can of course also create PNGs. I want a DSL that is optimized to describe graphics for humans (so no SVG). And with a framwork you can easily adjust the fonts to your liking. Rounded edges in general? no problem. Rounded arrows? No problem. All icons with background of gray? No problem. Compile to 173x294 pixels? No problem... It's much much more flexible than any Illustrator format will ever be and it'll allow real collaboration and source code versioning. I think asymptote would be great candidate and it's very close to the DSL I'd like. The good thing is that most of it is also written in asymptote itself so it's very extensible (unlike some other graphics languages)
- eropple 13y agoI have a hard time seeing anyone actually use this for one reason: it's not Illustrator. Build something that allows them to completely use their existing, frankly much more user-friendly, workflow with no changes and it might at least get looked at. (Illustrator already supports EPS, but since everyone who matters already has Illustrator, not a lot of people bother, even when not running outside EPS's format restrictions.) Nobody cares about your standards if meeting your standards doesn't benefit them. And the people actually creating stuff own Illustrator already.
- susi22 13y agoHere: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues?page=1&state=open https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues?page=1&st... https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/pulls https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/pulls Result: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/graphs/commit-activity https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/graphs/commit-ac...
- mietek 13y agoAgain, PostScript. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#.22Hello_world.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript#.22Hello_world.22
- susi22 13y agoPostscript is so unpopular to use as a programming language that github doesn't even have it in their languages. I'm not even sure if you're just trolling or serious?
- derekp7 13y agoI can second the use of postscript. A while back, I took it as a challenge to learn it, and ended up making some fairly extensive programs. I've actually found myself wishing there was a popular general-purpose scripting language that closely resembled postscript (stack-based, first class functions, first class environments). You can download the books for it for free (the "blue book" is the tutorial). I highly recommend it, along with the "red book" which is also useful for adding to your general programming language theory.