The Unique Tools Of The Trade

UnifontEX’s creation process involved a LOT of decisions and techniques in regards to tools used.

The project started life as editing the TrueType builds because the .hex files were and are unusable in my development environment, not for lack of trying. I used FontForge (the same program that created them) because I can’t afford other stuff. It was drudge work deleting all placeholder glyphs. I also used FontForge to set all sorts of flags that make the font work in terminals. I also took steps to make it work in BirdFont. Now FontForge is terrible, and buggy, including crash-heavy. This was no easy task. Getting MATH and BASE tables to generate was nearly impossible, but it magically did.

After the many years of FontForge processing, I used the now-archive.org-only CacheTT to add LTSH, hdmx, and VDMX tables, but evidently without hinting, the first two don’t generate, which turned out to be just as good.

I used two WOFF converters to add more features, including an Easter egg, and I even used niche versions of certain programs to get Arduino versions, and I exported a version of the font with bitmaps specifically to get TTF2PNG to render the bottom pixel row of Plane 14 glyphs.

I used Neko Project 2 Wii to make the PC-98 version because desktop did not work. I also used my own program to make a WOFF3 proof-of-concept, and I went as far as using 7-Zip on the SVG version to make an SVGZ one, and then I used ttf2eot via NodeJS to make an Internet Explorer EOT. Basically, I used all sorts of programs, and I also ruled out ones like TTFAutohint. All to get the right sets of tables. I’d even tried adding the SVG table in the font, only to find it made coloring characters impossible.

9 years of effort, and MANY programs.