Smith is a program to help build fonts and keyboards. Building a font can take numerous steps and involve numerous programs, which if done by hand would be prohibitively slow. Even working out what those steps are can take a lot of work. Smith uses a description file that allows the user to describe how to build the font and smith uses this to decide precisely which commands should be executed in which order. As a result, using smith reduces build times to seconds rather than minutes or hours, and makes build, test, fix, repeat cycles very manageable. In addition, by making the build and test processes for a set of fonts repeatable, the whole process can be shared with others simply. This allows for fonts to truly be open software.