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.

Note: This version of the toolkit has been restructured and what was C code has been partially ported to C++. For now these changes are considered experimental and there may be significant bugs. However, the new code can do more or less what the older code did and passes our test suite.

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.

📣 Recent News

AFDKO 5.0.0 is a major release featuring:

• Unified command interface: afdko <command> syntax
• Variable font support in addfeatures (replaces makeotfexe)
• Extensive C→C++ codebase modernization

See NEWS.md for full release notes and migration guide.

Installation

The AFDKO requires Python 3.10 or later. It should work with any Python > 3.10, but occasionally tool-chain components and dependencies don't keep pace with major Python releases, so there might be some lag time while they catch up.

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 python3.9
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, util-linux-libs or uuid-dev. 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 .

Developing

If you'd like to develop & debug AFDKO using Xcode, run:

CMake -G Xcode .

For further information on building from source see docs/FDK_Build_Notes.md.