Pre-onboarding template for designers

[emmamarichal]

WIP

I had a discussion with @RosaWagner about how improve our onboarding process, especially how to help designers prepare their files.
In order to help designers to control their project as much as possible and not to be surprised by all the changes we make according to the GF specs, we could provide them this simplified guide, which will be a kind of checklist to follow (we still need to define what form this will take).
This checklist can be linked to each corresponding chapter in the guide.

This is just the structure, I added few points but there will be many things to complete as we go along.

Repo

• Repo Structure

Font infos

• Font name
• Copyright and license strings
• Version number

Outlines

• Segments
• Nodes
• Components
• Special interpolation (alternate layers, rvrn feature etc.)

For Latin fonts

Glyphset

• Glyphset
• Glyphs names: prod names, nice names, unicode ?
• OpenType features

Accents

• Accented composite glyphs (auto-alignement / combining accents / anchors on every base glyphs)
• Anchors alignement
• Legacy marks are created by using the combining marks as components and have a positive advance width value ≠0.
• Localisation and Special glyphs

Spacing and Kerning

• Groups
• List of main pairs
• Kerning tools

Vertical Metrics

• Use_Typo_Metrics is enabled.
• typoAscender and hheaAscender set higher than À
• typoLineGap and hheaLineGap set to 0
• typoDescender and hheaDescender set lower than the deepest descender of the primary script.
• winAscent and winDecent set to yMax and yMin (absolute highest and lowest point in the font

Style Naming

• The RIBBI convention

Variable Font

• Axes
• STAT
• FVAR
• AVAR
• Conventions for wght, wdth, opsz, ital

[RosaWagner]

Ideally, there should be a chapter or a part of chapter dedicated to further develop any point of the check list. So this check list would actually help us to see what is missing from the Guide. Eg. Chapter about Kerning/Spacing, I know @vv-monsalve has also checklists and advises about it, we could use a separate issue to draft the chapter.

[vv-monsalve]

All in favor of having this as a checklist pointing at (linking) the GF-Guide. It could be added as a new issue in upstream repo as soon as the project is accepted (or received in case of commissioned)
Also about creating the missing pieces like Kerning/Spacing, among others. E.g., I'll need to update the Vertical metrics chapter after my tests to our current spec, including Ắ instead À.

[vv-monsalve]

I'll need to update the Vertical metrics chapter after my tests to our current spec, including Ắ instead À.

I've already done that.

@emmamarichal, I think we already include such a checklist in the Add-font Issue template with multiple links to the contents of this Guide. Would you like to keep this issue open?

[emmamarichal]

@vv-monsalve The checklist in Add-font is not as precise as this one, but I don't think that issue template is the right place for this kind of to-do list. Maybe this is something we can add in the Readme? (in the repo template).
I know that the GF guide is linked in the issue template, but I'm afraid it's too long and dense to be read, and maybe sometimes designers need to have a more synthetical check list (with direct links to anchors or outlines pages for example). What do you think?