glifLib

glifLib.py – Generic module for reading and writing the .glif format.

More info about the .glif format (GLyphInterchangeFormat) can be found here:

http://robofab.com/ufo/glif.html

The main class in this module is GlyphSet. It manages a set of .glif files in a folder. It offers two ways to read glyph data, and one way to write glyph data. See the class doc string for details.

glyphNameToFileName(glyphName, glyphSet)

Default algorithm for making a file name out of a glyph name. This one has limited support for case insensitive file systems: it assumes glyph names are not case sensitive apart from the first character:

‘a’ -> ‘a.glif’ ‘A’ -> ‘A_.glif’ ‘A.alt’ -> ‘A_.alt.glif’ ‘A.Alt’ -> ‘A_.Alt.glif’ ‘T_H’ -> ‘T__H_.glif’ ‘T_h’ -> ‘T__h.glif’ ‘t_h’ -> ‘t_h.glif’ ‘F_F_I’ -> ‘F__F__I_.glif’ ‘f_f_i’ -> ‘f_f_i.glif’

class GlyphSet(dirName, glyphNameToFileNameFunc=None)

GlyphSet manages a set of .glif files inside one directory.

GlyphSet’s constructor takes a path to an existing directory as it’s first argument. Reading glyph data can either be done through the readGlyph() method, or by using GlyphSet’s dictionary interface, where the keys are glyph names and the values are (very) simple glyph objects.

To write a glyph to the glyph set, you use the writeGlyph() method. The simple glyph objects returned through the dict interface do not support writing, they are just means as a convenient way to get at the glyph data.

glyphClass

alias of Glyph

rebuildContents()

Rebuild the contents dict by checking what glyphs are available on disk.

getReverseContents()

Return a reversed dict of self.contents, mapping file names to glyph names. This is primarily an aid for custom glyph name to file name schemes that want to make sure they don’t generate duplicate file names. The file names are converted to lowercase so we can reliably check for duplicates that only differ in case, which is important for case-insensitive file systems.

writeContents()

Write the contents.plist file out to disk. Call this method when you’re done writing glyphs.

readGlyph(glyphName, glyphObject=None, pointPen=None)

Read a .glif file for ‘glyphName’ from the glyph set. The ‘glyphObject’ argument can be any kind of object (even None); the readGlyph() method will attempt to set the following attributes on it:

“width” the advance with of the glyph “unicodes” a list of unicode values for this glyph “note” a string “lib” a dictionary containing custom data

All attributes are optional, in two ways:

1. An attribute won’t be set if the .glif file doesn’t contain data for it. ‘glyphObject’ will have to deal with default values itself.
2. If setting the attribute fails with an AttributeError (for example if the ‘glyphObject’ attribute is read- only), readGlyph() will not propagate that exception, but ignore that attribute.

To retrieve outline information, you need to pass an object conforming to the PointPen protocol as the ‘pointPen’ argument. This argument may be None if you don’t need the outline data.

readGlyph() will raise KeyError if the glyph is not present in the glyph set.

writeGlyph(glyphName, glyphObject=None, drawPointsFunc=None)

Write a .glif file for ‘glyphName’ to the glyph set. The ‘glyphObject’ argument can be any kind of object (even None); the writeGlyph() method will attempt to get the following attributes from it:

“width” the advance with of the glyph “unicodes” a list of unicode values for this glyph “note” a string “lib” a dictionary containing custom data

All attributes are optional: if ‘glyphObject’ doesn’t have the attribute, it will simply be skipped.

To write outline data to the .glif file, writeGlyph() needs a function (any callable object actually) that will take one argument: an object that conforms to the PointPen protocol. The function will be called by writeGlyph(); it has to call the proper PointPen methods to transfer the outline to the .glif file.

deleteGlyph(glyphName)

Permanently delete the glyph from the glyph set on disk. Will raise KeyError if the glyph is not present in the glyph set.

getUnicodes()

Return a dictionary that maps all glyph names to lists containing the unicode value[s] for that glyph, if any. This parses the .glif files partially, so is a lot faster than parsing all files completely.

readGlyphFromString(aString, glyphObject=None, pointPen=None)

Read .glif data from a string into a glyph object.

The ‘glyphObject’ argument can be any kind of object (even None); the readGlyphFromString() method will attempt to set the following attributes on it:

“width” the advance with of the glyph “unicodes” a list of unicode values for this glyph “note” a string “lib” a dictionary containing custom data

All attributes are optional, in two ways:

1. An attribute won’t be set if the .glif file doesn’t contain data for it. ‘glyphObject’ will have to deal with default values itself.
2. If setting the attribute fails with an AttributeError (for example if the ‘glyphObject’ attribute is read- only), readGlyphFromString() will not propagate that exception, but ignore that attribute.

To retrieve outline information, you need to pass an object conforming to the PointPen protocol as the ‘pointPen’ argument. This argument may be None if you don’t need the outline data.

writeGlyphToString(glyphName, glyphObject=None, drawPointsFunc=None, writer=None)

Return .glif data for a glyph as a UTF-8 encoded string. The ‘glyphObject’ argument can be any kind of object (even None); the writeGlyphToString() method will attempt to get the following attributes from it:

“width” the advance with of the glyph “unicodes” a list of unicode values for this glyph “note” a string “lib” a dictionary containing custom data

All attributes are optional: if ‘glyphObject’ doesn’t have the attribute, it will simply be skipped.

To write outline data to the .glif file, writeGlyphToString() needs a function (any callable object actually) that will take one argument: an object that conforms to the PointPen protocol. The function will be called by writeGlyphToString(); it has to call the proper PointPen methods to transfer the outline to the .glif file.