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Trailer

A tool for making demo versions of your fonts

    python trailer.py font.otf font_trial.otf --keep-characters A B C \ 
    --keep-glyph-names space --keep-unicodes-base10 82 \
    --replacer-character n

pyftsubset

There is a great tool for substituting fonts, it's called pyftsubset and it's part of fontTools! I have always found it a bit too complicated to make trial fonts with it. In my opinion that this tool is primarily meant for substituting fonts that go on the web - making it smaller in size, removing unnecessary data and unnecessary characters as well.

Why Trailer?

Removing certain glyphs of a font for purposes of providing a trial licence might not be that useful as .notdef glyph or fallback font can show up instead of a missing glyph. This can lead to confusion, especially when your font's fallback font can't be easily spotted. For example monospaced to monospaced. Making pyftsubset not changing anything else except the glyph set is a challenge by itself. I found it much easier and handy to replace unwanted glyphs with an arbitrary glyph, which can give better overview of the typeface's texture while still limiting the font's character set.

How do I control it?

Trailer has two positional arguments

  1. Path to a font which you want to make a trial of
  2. Path where you want to save it it has two groups of keyword arguments
  3. A space-separated list of glyphs in one or more of the following ways
    • --keep-characters Keeps glyphs which represent given characters, use f.e. 0 1 2 a b c . ? !
    • --keep-glyph-names Keeps glyphs of given glyph names, use f.e. zero one two a b c period question exclam
    • --keep-unicodes-base10 Keeps glyphs mapped to given unicodes in base 10, use f.e. 48 49 50 97 98 99 46 63 33
  4. A glyph which will replace the glyphs that were not set to be kept. I refer to such glyph as a replacer. You can set only one of the following arguments
    • --replacer-character A glyph representing given character will become replacer, f.e. *
    • --replacer-glyph-name A glyph with given name will become replacer, f.e. asterisk
    • --replacer-unicode-base10 A glyph with given unicode will become replacer, f.e. 42
  5. And then there are optional arguments
    • --skip Will ignore if any glyph out of the ones that should be kept is missing in the font
    • --ttf-components Replaced glyph will contain replacer as a component in TrueType flavoured fonts
    • --suffix Suffix which font's name will obtain. F.e. name like Font Sans with suffix set to Trial will become Font Sans Trial
    • --family-name Sets name based on which the family name replacing is done. If not set, the program will determine the name itself based on name entry 1 in name table.
python trailer.py font.otf font_trial.otf --keep-characters A B C \ 
--keep-glyph-names space --keep-unicodes-base10 82 \
--replacer-character "n"

To do:

  • Update kerning pairs, so glyphs not containing their original shape are updated accordingly.
  • Flatten components. If user wants to keep i it should keep its components as well.
  • Sequence of replacing characters. Replacing a-z with n might not give the best impression of the typeface. Replacing it with sequence of f.e. n, o, s might give more a bit more rhytmical and representing result.

Happy trialing!

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