A public beta release of Robofont will be available shortly after TYPO Labs. The core philosophy of the tools didn’t change:

• the editor is based on a documented and open source font format
• least knowledge possible is pushed into the design of the editor,
• space and support for implementation of plugins and extensions

The new version will not differ much in terms of user interface. Most of the improvements happen under the hood. The editor will move from version 2 to version 3 of UFO font format with a better support of layers, images and binary data in general. The improved support for layers will come soon very handy in designing variable fonts.

UFO3 reading and writing internal API has been completely rewritten keeping in mind optimization and performance. Opening a ufo file will be faster, here you will get those promised 30 seconds extra.

There will be at least one other major change: Robofab support is going to stop. As like many people in the room, I started my first steps into coding using Robofab messing with font data. It will be a sad moment, but the context changed and robofab is too much fontlab-centric for the actual scenario. It will be replaced by fontParts, the old Robofab code will be mostly compatible through some minor fixes.

This is an important step because different applications will be able to implement this object model and it will be possible to share easily code across different environments.

Robofont 2.0 will also have an extension store. Thanks to the Mechanic experience we know that many designers and developers are willing to craft tools and share them with others. Many of them would like to make even more tools, but it should be more somehow sustainable economically. So Frederik decided to open a shop: users will be able to purchase, install and update external certified tools directly from the font editor.
Frederik showed also Robofont support to variable fonts, which has been there since the very beginning. Robofont always paired very well with Superpolator, so dealing with design spaces isn’t really a new thing for Robofont users. At this stage production tools are still in a beta phase, but Robofont is getting constantly updated.