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I always thought you had to buy a font editor to make a real typeface, then a guy in a Discord call showed me his Glyphs file open in a text editor
I've been messing with lettering in Illustrator for years and always figured drawing a real font meant paying for Glyphs or RoboFont or whatever, because that's what everyone in the forums says. Then two months ago I was in a late night Discord call with this guy named Dev who runs a tiny type foundry out of his spare room in Providence, and he shared his screen and just opened the .glyphs file in VS Code right in front of me. It's basically plist underneath, all these XML tags for nodes and anchors, and he edits spacing values and kerning pairs by hand in the text editor and then reloads it. He said he does maybe 30 percent of his cleanup that way now, especially for batches of accented glyphs where he can find and replace a whole anchor position across 40 characters at once. I sat there kind of annoyed at myself because I've been dragging node points around with a mouse for six years and never once thought to look at what the file actually was. Since then I wrote a tiny Python script that renames my layers to a consistent scheme across all my masters, took me about 40 minutes to get working and it saves me an hour per weight. Not saying I'd build a whole font in a text editor, that sounds miserable, but for the boring repetitive stuff it's honestly faster. Has anyone else here gone down the script route for cleanup tasks, and what did you end up automating first?
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