Fontbakery: FontBakery UI app with Gooey

[davelab6]

Observed behaviour

@twardoch made https://github.com/twardoch/pypolona with https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey

Expected behaviour

We may be able to make a simple FontBakery UI app image in the same way.

[felipesanches]

That would be very cool!

@eliheuer and I had considered the idea of having a GUI for FB, and we even opened a git repo with some half-baked source files, but never really made it work: https://github.com/eliheuer/fontbakery-desktop

We might move that repo to the googlefonts account so that it can live side-by-side with the fontbakery repo and then maybe replace all (or most) of its contents if anyone can have a better solution such as what @twardoch suggested.

This sounds promising ;-)

[felipesanches]

the need for a GUI shows up anytime we have a workshop with designers

[eliheuer]

https://github.com/eliheuer/fontbakery-desktop

I just made that repo private because there is not much to salvage there besides the idea for the GUI.

I do know the tools available now are better than when I made that repo, so there is probably an easier solution like Gooey.

[felipesanches]

ok, cool!

I still have a fork of that and I will keep mine up as an open invitation to anybody who may want to work on this: https://github.com/felipesanches/fontbakery-desktop

[twardoch]

I'll be looking into this (already have a bit). The way Bakery works is it's doing some hackery when loading the "plugins" i.e. the different subcommands. It's not standard argparse subparsers stuff. Plain-vanilla Gooey may not work and I'm not sure if this can be salvaged.

Perhaps we can rewrite that bit (the loading of subcommands) to be dynamic but less "hacky", or there can be another solution. I almost had something ready. Gooey does indeed do the heavy lifting but only if it can get a more-less standardized argparse call that it can decorate.

[twardoch]

basically that https://github.com/googlefonts/fontbakery/blob/master/Lib/fontbakery/cli.py — it's a rather nonstandard way to gather the subcommands. But I'll see what we can do

[graphicore]

rather nonstandard way to gather subcommands

What's a rather standard way then?

[graphicore]

Sorry, I see you already described what you mean a bit.

[eliheuer]

If Gooey doesn't end up working I got pretty far towards a simple Font Bakery desktop app with just wxPython and py2app here: https://github.com/eliheuer/fbwx

When run from a virtual environment you drag and drop a font onto the app window and get a new markdown report on the Desktop. The only problem is someone needs to figure out if/how to run a subprocess.call in a venv from the py2app app: https://github.com/eliheuer/fbwx/issues/1

I realize this might be a dead-end, just sharing in case it isn't and someone knows how to make it work.

[simoncozens]

See also https://github.com/simoncozens/fontbakery-ui

[eliheuer]

That works great! Thanks Simon.

[flavio-assakawa]

Hello!
I am a design student who was introduced to fontbakery in one of my lectures lecture, and i'm actually interested in working on an interface for fontbakery on my graduation project beggining next year, and got the proposal approved this week (i'm still kind of clueless regarding coding, so something towards information architecture, usability studies and layoutting), so i plan be basing myself on the projects here in the future.

[simoncozens]

Hi Flavio! That's excellent. I'm looking forward to your involvement.

I've worked on a simple app so far which you can download here but I have the opposite problem: I am a coder but not a designer/usability person. So it currently looks really unattractive and unpleasant. But send me your ideas and I will try to make them reality!