Creating a controller object

The controller object is responsible for building and managing the designspace.

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• Introduction
  • Why a controller is needed
  • Duties of the controller
• The controller object
  • Default project settings
• Creating a custom controller

Introduction

In parametric fonts, the designspace is tightly coupled to various measurements (parameters) in the fonts.

During the design stage, the glyph shapes are still changing all the time, and if a measurement changes the parametric designspace must change accordingly.

Why a controller is needed

As designspaces get larger, it becomes harder and harder to keep track and update these relationships by hand.

The controller object takes care of building and managing the designspace, ensuring that file names are consistent and parametric values are always correct and up-do-date.

Duties of the controller

• create new parametric sources
• set source names automatically from measurements
• clean-up and normalize UFO sources
• build the parametric designspace from measurements
• …

A documentation of the xProject API is on its way.

The controller object

The xProject controller is a base object which is meant to be subclassed and customized for each project. It provides a basic API for gathering different kinds of data from multiple files and building a parametric variable font from it.

from xTools4.modules.xproject import xProject

folder = 'MyFolder/'

p = xProject(folder, 'My Family')
p.printSettings()

Default project settings

Creating a custom controller

To create a custom controller for your project, start by subclassing xProject. In the example below, we are adding a subfamily argument to the project constructor, and changing the designspace file name and the source folder path to accomodate multiple subfamilies.

from xTools4.modules.xproject import xProject

class MyController(xProject):

    def __init__(self, folder, familyName, subFamily):
        self.baseFolder = folder
        self.familyName = familyName
        self.subFamily  = subFamily

    @property
    def designspaceFile(self):
        return f"{self.familyName.replace(' ', '')}-{self.subFamily.replace(' ', '')}.designspace"

    @property
    def sourcesFolder(self):
        return os.path.join(self.baseFolder, self.sourcesFolderName, self.subFamily)


p = MyController(folder, 'My Family', 'Roman')
p.printSettings()

This will produce the output below. Notice how the subfamily Roman is now part of the designspace name and sources folder.

base folder: MyFolder/
family name: My Family

designspace file: MyFamily-Roman.designspace
designspace path: MyFolder/Sources/Roman/MyFamily-Roman.designspace (False)

sources folder name: Sources
sources folder path: MyFolder/Sources/Roman (False)

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