Demo that the Plugin API is suitable to make something like word-o-mat?

[davelab6]

While chatting with @JeremieHornus and @chrissimpkins about #1998 and what ought to be considered part of a "v1.0" release of any font editor, I championed the inclusion of a plugin/extension API feature, since I believe GlyphsApp and RoboFont had that at their v1.0 releases (and indeed this was kind of the whole point of RoboFont to exist :)

I was later chatting with Chris about the uses of LLMs in type design and development, and he was talking about how effective they are at developing what i call 'sample texts' or 'proofing strings'. Chris' idea was inspired by a post on TypeDrawers where someone was looking for "African language" words that include the exemplars [x], [y], [z], in a number of African languages. Chris had prompted Gemini for that request with Hausa, asking for one word per exemplar provided in a list, and was returned ten words that included each of the exemplars. I then immediately thought "that would make a great fontra plugin" :)

So I'd like to propose that the fontra extension APIs be implemented and documented to such a level that someone on the fontra team can make a nice little video tutorial showing how to replicate something like https://github.com/ninastoessinger/word-o-mat as a fontra plugin.

If this is part of the actual #1998 v1.0 scope or not, is a different question, but I thought I'd share this idea of having a practical litmus test for the readiness of the Fontra Plugin API :)

[justvanrossum]

I believe Simon's work on #1952 will additionally make externally hosted extensions/plugins closer to reality.

[BlackFoundry]

as far as I remember, the plugins development had to be made simpler for testing offline/locally before it's hosted externally

[davelab6]

Excellent!