Discussion of tools?

[cdlm]

I quickly went through the website, and haven't seen much about tools; as an outsider with just a superficial knowledge of font design tools, I would gladly read more about those, but miss some pointers. Maybe it's there and I went over it, but at least a quick recap of where *.fea files fit in the build process of a font, and what are the up/down-stream tools would help provide some perspective?

[typesupply]

This varies from tool to tool and workflow to workflow. Sometimes the .fea is a separate file that must be edited in a text editor and other times the .fea code is stored in the tool's file format that must be edited within the tool's built in editor. This is usually covered within a particular tool's documentation.

• http://doc.robofont.com/documentation/workspace/features/
• https://www.glyphsapp.com/tutorials/features-part-1-simple-substitutions

My cookbook is aimed at supplementing this type of documentation because usually the documentation is "Here is how you write features in this particular tool..." and not "Here is how you think about features in general..." Plus, .fea has become a de facto standard for representing GSUB and GPOS in text form and there are at least three parsers/lexers/compilers (AFDKO, FontForge, FontTools). The workflow and toolset are becoming more and more subject to interpretation.

So, the tools are out of scope in my opinion. Plus, maintaining tool documentation sucks because it goes out of date so quickly. :)

[cdlm]

What you just explained fits my bill. As a newcomer, the ecosystem being what it is, it's reassuring to have confirmation and a couple useful pointers from an insider. Much less frustrating than trying things from random sources and wondering why nothing works :)