Graphite Tutorial
The following exercises are provided to give you an introduction to programming Graphite fonts. It includes an explanation of the fundamentals of the system and basic experience in using its most important smart rendering capabilities. This tutorial is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of the Graphite system, nor to provide an exhaustive discussion of all the features and syntax of the GDL programming language. For a complete discussion of GDL, see the “Graphite Description Language” document.
 | GDL Documentation Sharon Correll, 2020-05-21 Download "GDLdocumentation.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 725KB [8637 downloads] |
In order to use these tutorials, you will need to use the Graphite compiler and WorldPad, a Graphite-enabled text editor for Windows. The readme files contain installation instructions. For some of the later exercises, it may also be helpful to use the Keyman utility for typing test data.
These tutorials are compatible with WorldPad 2.1 and GrCompiler 1.0.1 and later versions. (GrCompiler 1.0 does not support the U+… syntax in the glyph table. Earlier versions of WorldPad require a special font installation process.)
Each unit of the tutorial consists of a short discussion section followed by one or more exercises for you to try.
Start: Compiling, installing, and testing a Graphite font
Return to Graphite font development
Contents
Unit 1: Compiling, installing, and testing a Graphite font
Unit 2: A very simple GDL program
Unit 4: Corresponding class items
Unit 5: Deletion and insertion
Unit 9: Multiple passes per table
Unit 10: Positioning by shifting
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