Google Fonts Tools

This project contains tools used for working with the Google Fonts collection, plus Google Fonts Glyph Set Documentation in the /encodings subdirectory. While these tools are primarily intended for contributors to the Google Fonts project, anyone who works with fonts could find them useful.

The tools and files under this directory are available under the Apache License v2.0, for details see LICENSE

Google Fonts Official Glyph Sets

The glyph sets useful for type designers that were previously hosted in this repository have been moved to:

https://github.com/googlefonts/glyphsets/tree/main/GF_glyphsets

Tool Usage Examples

Compare fonts:

gftools compare-font font1.ttf font2.ttf

Add a METADATA.pb to a family directory

gftools add-font ../ofl/newfamily

Sanity check a family directory:

gftools sanity-check --repair_script=/tmp/fix.py ../ofl/josefinsans
gftools sanity-check --repair_script=/tmp/fix.py --fix_type=fsSelection ../ufl

Check a font family against the same family hosted on Google Fonts:

gftools qa [fonts.ttf] -gfb -a -o qa

Check a variable font family against the same family as static fonts:

gftools qa -f [vf_fonts] -fb [static_fonts] --diffenator --diffbrowsers -o ~/path/out

Fix a non hinted font

gftools fix-nonhinting font_in.ttf font_out.ttf

Package and PR a family update to google/fonts. Much more detailed documentation.

gftools packager "Family Sans" path/to/local/google/fonts -py

Tool Installation

Please note that gftools requires Python 3.7 or later.

Please install these tools using pip:

pip install gftools

(Mac OS users on M1 chips will need to upgrade pip first to support universal wheels: pip install -U pip.)

If you need to use gftools qa, you will need to install cairo and pkg-config. These can be installed on OS X using homebrew:

brew install cairo pkg-config

Once you have installed these system packages, install gftools using the following command:

pip install 'gftools[qa]'

Tool Requirements and Dependencies

These tools depend on the submodule GlyphsInfo. Make sure the submodule is up to date by running:

git submodule update --init --recursive

gftools packager needs the command line git program in a version >= Git 2.5 (Q2 2015) in order to perform a shallow clone (--depth 1) of the font upstream repository and branch. This is not supported by pygit2/libgit2 yet.

gftools manage-traffic-jam requires two private files which contain sensitive data. Ask m4rc1e for them.

Google Fonts API Key

In order to use the scripts gftools qa and gftools family-html-snippet, you will need to generate a Google Fonts api key, https://developers.google.com/fonts/. You will then need to create a new text file located on your system at ~/.gf-api-key (where ~ is your home directory), which contains the following:

[Credentials]
key = your-newly-generated-googlefonts-api-key

Upstream project repos

• https://github.com/schriftgestalt/GlyphsInfo
• https://github.com/google/protobuf
• https://github.com/behdad/fonttools